Returning to Scripture When Your Heart Feels Numb with Sarah Swain
“How long has it been since you opened your Bible and consistently read Scripture?” This question, gently asked to me by my faithful Christian friend 50 plus years my senior, was met with a long pause. In a tone tinged with guilt and sadness, I hesitantly admitted, “It’s been a long time.”
My whole life had been turned upside down during the second half of the year in 2021. That August my husband and I found out we were pregnant with our third child. Due to be born on my birthday I felt like God had given me such a wonderful gift. Unfortunately, things quickly grew complicated and confusing with the pregnancy. A rapid succession of obstetric appointments and fluctuating HCG levels culminated in a bleeding ectopic pregnancy and emergency surgery to remove my right fallopian tube. A cancer scare complicated the recovery and left us grieving not only the loss of our sweet baby, but anxiety and fear over my health. When specialized DNA testing came back negative for cancer, we found ourselves in a prolonged season of disappointment. We hurt at seeing negative pregnancy tests month after month.
In my broken heart, I felt like God chose to allow things to happen to me that felt cruel. I felt justified in my hurt because I believed that the God I knew, whose character was love, mercy, and compassion, differed from the God I was experiencing. I’ve had many seasons of hardships, death, and difficulty in my life, but this one affected me on such a deeply personal and physical level that I felt shaken to my core. When I managed to mumble a prayer, sing worship songs in church, or try to read Scripture, all I felt was one ever-present emotion–numbness.
It’s a common stage of grief to feel numb. When your hurting heart seems too painful to bear it’s often easier to pull away from fully processing the pain and instead retreat to a place where you choose not to feel much of anything. While that can help alleviate some of the pain and hurt, it can also keep you from experiencing joy, happiness, or hope. This is the place I camped out in with God, day after day choosing to stay emotionally and spiritually stagnant. Ultimately, I chose to keep Him at a distance from me because I blamed Him for allowing me to walk through the pain and suffering. The chain of painful events that led to a once-again empty womb felt like deliberate arrows that God sent to pierce my irreparably shattered heart.
When I met with my mentor friend that morning, it felt humbling and somewhat sacrilegious to admit that I allowed myself to avoid reading my Bible for such an extended period. As a pastor’s wife, I knew God’s Word was true; it just didn’t feel like it. But reading chapter after chapter about the mercy, grace, and unending love that God bestows on His people felt like salt being rubbed into an open wound because that was not how I was experiencing Him in that season. Keeping God at a distance and allowing myself to not engage with His Word served as a protective coating, an armor of my own making, to shield myself from further hurt and disappointment from Him. “You’ve got to get back into Scripture,” she insisted. “You don’t need to feel anything right now, you just need to do it. Every day. Pick a verse or two and read it until you can’t read it anymore.” Nodding my head in agreement, with conviction prodding my heart, I promised to open my Bible the next day and give it an earnest try.
The next morning, as I sat on our front porch with my Bible open, my fingers clumsily flipped several pages until I got to the Psalms. I read through a couple before landing on Psalm 116. My eyes scanned the first two verses and I knew right away–this was the one. Tears filled my eyes and like a healing balm, the words softened my aching soul as I read them aloud repeatedly.“I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live” (Psalm 116: 1-2, ESV translation). In these two verses, David expresses his assurance that God patiently waits to hear His children when they cry for help. David is acknowledging that he was near death and that when he cried out to the Lord for rescue, God heard and mercifully answered. For those of us who are mothers, we know the cries of our children on an intimate level. We can be in a room full of other children but when we hear the piercing cry of our babies, or their little voices sobbing “Mama!”, we know them in an instant. Similarly, God knows our cries on a deeper, more intimate level. As our Creator, He innately knows our voice. As a Father to His children, His ear is readily inclined to hear us when we call.
Reading those two verses in Psalms that morning centered me back to where I needed to be, placing my trust in the knowledge that God has always heard my voice. It was a slow process to soften my heart and emerge from the cloud of numbness, but it started with truly committing to daily studying my Bible. I read Psalm 116 aloud repeatedly, sometimes as many as ten times in a row. I read it until I truly believed the words I said, “I love the Lord because He has heard my voice….”
Despite my sense of feeling numb, my heart truly did love God. I simply needed the reminder from Him through His holy Word. God heard and knew my voice, and He hears and knows each of our voices. My pleas for mercy, the groaning of my heart, the ache of a womb met with death and emptiness, none of that fell on deaf ears. Not one wasted word. God turned to me, listening for my voice and patiently waiting on me to call out to Him. I could choose to go on feeling numb, or I could dig into His Word and let it transform my heart. How thankful and grateful I am to serve a compassionate God who shows us patience, grace, and unending mercy.
Sarah Swain is a pastor’s wife, senior branch office administrator, and a mom to three children with one baby alive in the presence of Jesus. She and her husband Jacob have served in ministry in Carbondale at Redeemer Community Church for 15 years.
Sarah is a native of Marion, IL but has lived in Carbondale, IL for the past 8 years. Her favorite hobbies are thrifting, reading, enjoying walks on beautiful days, and wistfully dreaming of her next Disney World trip!
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