When life grabs you by your heart and not by your shoulders, your tongue grows still and your eyes lose their expression for a while, because the hurt places a lid on your senses. Too stunned to react, your heart has a silence laid upon it by the impossibility of what your feelings must process. Deeply wounded, it feels as though you have temporarily lost contact with your heart and with its tenderness. Every set of circumstances has its own recipe for making tears more salty or less. And so a weeping heart is a lonely and a painful story. Hurt can happen inside us or outside us. When it is stimulated at the same time from within and from without, you need a great deal of grace and something to hold on to.

The worst hurt is when tears fall into a bottomless well inside your soul, where they evaporate without consoling you. Postponed expectation, which drains down into the low places of our inner landscape, forms, over time, little dams that evaporate upwards to our eyes and bring relief for a dry heart. Unrelenting pain burns through your heart and lands like a branding iron on your soul, where it sears in the scar of suffering, so that you never again walk free of the herd, but, marked, belong to a crowd that has walked its own road of pain to the very same kraal. The Righteous Referee blows His whistle softly for our ears but clearly for our hearts. Although unfair play on our hearts sometimes carries on longer than we would like, He knows when the season is ripe for change.

To make your heart lighter, it helps to shed baggage. Baggage can be packed inside relationships, inside circumstances, or inside software. Every one of us writes our own programme for our emotional software. How we respond to any situation is therefore a choice. If how we respond causes more pain than what we are responding to, then we are working with faulty software. As long as we allow what is happening around us or to us to steer our emotions, we are the guinea pig for hurting and the product of our feelings. Emotions are the artery where you can bleed yourself to death if you do not have a fixed base in which to anchor them — a destiny inside you greater and more authoritative than any influence or any power outside you. Or a disposition that gives you the freedom to choose how you want to feel and how you will react. Because the last freedom of the human being is the freedom to choose how you want to feel, and therefore to react. Even if you could not choose how you would look, where you would live or with whom, or inside what circumstances you had to grow up and live, you can choose how you are going to handle all the shortcomings in you and in everyone around you. The frustration of injustice and the pain of sorrow can hold you captive only as long as you give them permission to. To rise up and to live above negativity is the privilege of everyone whose emotional software comes with a lifelong guarantee and does not "shut down" when you need it most. The impossibility of meaningfully processing pain makes of every scab that finally heals and falls away a triumph, but more than that, a miracle of grace, and when we look back, the dynamic within which humility and growth took place — the ideal resistance against which our personality and emotional stamina could train themselves fit.