“When you care enough to send the very best.” —Hallmark Cards

When I choose a greeting card to send to someone, I don’t choose the card with the corner already torn off. The card might get roughed up as it goes through the postal system, but I at least want to start with one that looks unspoiled. If I bake cookies for someone, I eat the broken ones myself (so good as a topping for ice cream!), and pack up the good ones for gift-giving. I don’t give away the crumbs.

When it comes to giving to God, we might tend to have the same attitude. After all, Scripture speaks of sacrificing the unblemished lamb, of giving our first fruits to God, not our leftovers. Churches often encourage volunteers to use their gifts, to contribute their talents, to give the first and the best that they have in service to God. 

But in Psalm 51, the psalmist offers God a different kind of gift:

In the Psalms, the word heart rarely means the heart of muscle and blood that beats in each one of us. Instead, the word heart means the inner person, our inner thoughts, our will, our character. So my heart is the thought, the will, the character, the self that I am inside. My heart makes me who I am, and your heart makes you who you are. Our heart is what makes us human, what makes us unique individuals.

In Psalm 51, the heart—the inner person—that pleases God is described as “a broken and contrite heart.” In the original Hebrew language, the word for “contrite” is literally the word crushed: a crushed heart, O God, you will not despise.

In this case, the psalmist’s heart was crushed and broken by sin:

For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is always before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
    and done what is evil in your sight.
—Psalm 51:3–4

Sin not only breaks our relationship with God and can hurt our relationships with other people, but sin can break us.

There are many other things in life that can crush our hearts and break us. Some describe feeling broken by the isolation and loss of the coronavirus pandemic. In a time of pandemic and at many other times, our hearts—our lives—are not whole and at their best. Many times our lives are broken—crushed by disappointments and anxiety, by failed relationships or failed finances, by physical or mental ill health, the death of loved ones, ongoing issues with no resolution in sight, fragmented by too many commitments and too little time and resources to meet them.

But when our lives seem to be in pieces—from disappointment or doubt or the daily push and pull of life—when we feel crushed and broken for whatever reason, we don’t need to pretend that all is well. We don’t need to hide that part of ourselves from God. We don’t need to feel that we’re not good enough for God or that we have nothing to offer.

Because while God delights in the offering of our first fruits and in the best we have to offer, God welcomes us just as gladly and just as graciously when all we have to bring is our brokenness. For the gift of a broken heart, you, God will not despise.

Photo credit: Image by Tomasz Wójcik from Pixabay.

I wrote this guest post in 2021 for Godspace, when my Dearheart was in cancer treatment and our area was still in a state of emergency due to the coronavirus pandemic. But since Godspace has changed since then, and the gift of a broken heart applies just as much today, I thought it was time to share this lightly revised version here. Thank you for reading, and I welcome your comments below.