Do you ever feel like your heart is just gonna explode from despair for what others carry around with them? Sometimes there are things that people we love go through that are simply impossible to fathom.  God has been breaking my heart for friends I love, students I work with and for people in our community who are suffering.  What do I do with this broken heart? What do I say to a student who comes home from camp and finds out his mom has died?  What do I tell him as I know his heart was already overwhelmed with depression before this awful experience?  What do I say to my friend who is struggling with doubting how awesome he is and battling thinking he needs a relationship to make him feel significant or loved? What do I say to an incredible friend who hurts so much in his heart from what he has experienced in life that it is just seems too big to deal with?  What do I tell him as life seems to continue to bring more and more painful experiences to pile on top of that which he walks with everyday? What can I do? The answers to these questions feel weak in comparison to the magnitude of all this pain, all this despair.  But I think that is the trick the devil would love to play on me, on all of us.  I think he wants us to think that telling those in pain that the God of the Universe loves them and feels their pain with them is weak, that it doesn’t help.  But it does!  How do I know?  Because that’s what helps me when I am in my own pain. Because that is what i have seen help countless numbers of friends and students over the past 20 years of my life.  He loves us!  He loves you!  We could never hear it enough.  We cant be reminded of it enough.  There is no way to wear out this truth!  It is what we, what I must live, as my heart breaks with those I love and is aching for those who are hurting around me.  What do I tell them?  I tell them that they are loved and God feels with them.  I tell them the truth about who they are in His eyes!  I tell them they are beautiful and they count, that they are valued and loved beyond anything they could possibly begin to understand.  I tell them that in their pain, God wants to make himself known as the great comforter and healer.  He will bind up their wounds and heal their broken hearts the way I am reminded in Psalm 147:3. There is no weakness in those answers! There is strength! There is strength for my aching and overwhelmed heart as well!  The Lord is the strength of my life.  The Lord is the strength of your life!  I will keep saying it.  I am grateful that he allows me to feel his heart.  I am thankful for the message he keeps whispering in my ear so that I can take it in, believe it and pass it on to those who are hurting.  I love my friends.  I feel for them and with them.  It is a privilege to know their hearts.  It is an honor to walk in their pain with them.  Thank you God for allowing me to experience the smallest part of what you feel for the whole of humanity that you love!