Trust in him at all times, O people;
    pour out your heart before him;
    God is a refuge for us. 

Psalm 62:8  (emphasis mine)

I sat in my bedroom in Budapest, perched on my white couch reading ‘Jesus Calling’. I was struggling with it all. In the end, my only assessment was that I was a mess. I didn’t know which end was up as I sought to grasp my overseas life. I was desperate for a shoulder to cry on, someone into whose eyes I could look and know they understood. I longed to be able to pour out my heart with honesty and freedom.

Then, my eyes fell upon this verse. I could have cried in relief and joy, seeing how God calls us to do just that. He is our trust and refuge, therefore we can pour out our hearts to Him.

I believed God wanted us to come to Him in all of our brokenness. I just didn’t know He wrote it in His word with such clarity and invitation. A weight fell off my shoulders that morning. I could and would come to Him continually and ‘pour out my heart’.

This call to give God the deep things of my heart comes in the confusing, the sorrowful, the angry, the ‘no-God please no’, the awesome, the holy, the so-very-God moments. I have experienced it in every season of the soul.

As I have walked my journey with mental illness this verse has deepened and groaned within me. In the lonely times, He has tenderly touched my shoulder, lifted my chin, with a sheen of tears to mirror my own and beckoned my heart. It is an achingly beautiful thing to experience.

Pouring out my heart before God defies any belief in the distance between Him and me. Who else will stay with me in the dark night and never tire of my grief or slumber in their weariness? Those who love me most fiercely will become weary and take their rest. Yet, this God. Oh this God. He says ‘pour out your heart beloved. I am ever here.’

But do we resist this? The weakness, the vulnerability of it all? This pouring out of our hearts is prefaced with a simple word, ‘trust.’ There must be trust to pour out our hearts. There must be the belief God is worthy of our deepest confidence. There must be the embrace of His love. There must be the knowledge He is worthy of our hearts because He sacrificed, poured out, heart of His own heart, Jesus, to bring us Home. There must be the face of the Savior, faithful and true.

When we trust in God, our heart wounds become this much more apparent, this much more crying out to be healed. It’s because we are in the safest place to pour out, in a sense lance, our festering soul wounds. We are being called into the holy of our own nakedness.

I remember the days after we returned home to the States, in the throes of my diagnosis with bipolar disorder. I was shell-shocked. We left a home in which we’d invested 10 years so that it could become our own. And, it all happened so suddenly. As I literally tried to put one foot in front of the other, this pouring out of my heart was a silent understanding. I had no words. I had no confidence. I couldn’t even begin to define my grief. There was nothing except trust in this refuge of God. With my soul eyes I could see His depth of compassion and how his hands held my heart, while it poured forth a pain too big for me.

As we live, move and have our being in God, the pouring out of our hearts becomes a living, growing thing. As we learn of God we reach deeper into ourselves to give our vulnerable places to Him. As our confidence in Him grows, we come more often and lean harder when we do. Soon, we can’t imagine not having this invitation, not being called to come and pour out our pain, anger, frustration, hurt, rejection and a million other things.

This is what it is to walk this road. I have been a believer all of my life, yet just ‘found’ this verse a few years ago. Along with it are a multitude of other gems. As we let our hearts, our lives, be shaped by these precious promises nestled in God’s love letter to us, we will be changed. We will find the deepest strains of song which beckon us home. The weary travelers we are will find refuge in God, our safe haven, the arms which will never, ever let us go.