I’ve struggled all my life with shame about my sensitive, bruise-like-a-peach heart. To feel things this deeply is often painful + usually manifests in physical ailments so my body literally is bruised like a peach.

God has been helping me to love the beauty of my soul, and I am still learning to see the strengths that God wrapped in all that tenderness.

So my heart wants to run out and straight out hug the people I meet who struggle with the same sensitivity. I love your heart, God does too. I just want to pour out love + adoption all over your bruises till you begin to believe that you are so worth loving.

I love the outcasts, misunderstood, misfits. I champion the underdogs. I am all for that Isaiah 40:4 revolution when every oppressed + depressed shall be raised up, and I am giving all I can to hasten the day.

All this to say that I am for you, I am on your side. Because here’s the thing: the Lord recently brought a gentle correction to a blind-spot in my heart, and I want to share it with you.

Would you allow me to? I promise to be honest + gentle. I promise that what I’m about to say is for you, not against you.

Come in, sit with me awhile at the feet of Jesus.

Our Abba asked this question that shot like an arrow straight to my heart: I love your sensitive heart, but why do you not practice this same sensitivity to others?

He asked me why, when I was so sensitive to what my heart was feeling, I could be so insensitive sometimes to others with my words + action.

The arrow of His words divided my being from my doing, and there revealed a divergence. It shocked me, but it did not wound me. It was healing + reviving.

And I realised that it was true.

Growing up with this sensitivity had conditioned me to always be on the defensive — I had to protect my mushy insides, I had to look out for myself. In doing so, I had become inward-looking and carried a flawed sense of entitlement that I was more special and, therefore, deserved to be treated with more care, than others.

So I asked the only logical question (in my mind) in response to this revelation: What should I do to fix this?

His response? Let Me take you deeper still. Let your roots grow deep. Deeper and deeper into Love.

To understand the solution, we have to go back to the root of the problem. Because the genesis of the defect is often a prophetic picture its creator’s original design.

Where do we start? Eden + Babel.

There is an affliction that all children of Adam + Eve share. It is so ubiquitously woven into our DNA that we barely notice its existence.

Its name? Loneliness.

Its sidekick? Rejection, fear, self-pity.

Sensitive people might feel this more acutely, but it is a universal battle.

At the fall, the inviolate bond of trust, honor, and perfect love was torn in two. Man betrayed woman, woman mistrusted man and God, man hid from God. Man and woman hid their eyes from God and began to look to themselves. Gone was perfect communion + communication. In its place was a brokenness within and without, and it continued to degenerate through Adam and Eve’s descendants.

This decline was further perpetuated at Babel. When man again mistrusted God’s heart for them and looked to themselves, striving to become like God by their own strength, God had to save them from themselves. He made them unable to understand each others’ words, but the deeper consequence was this — man could no longer understand each other’s hearts, including their own.

We’ve not only been disconnected from God and others, we’ve also been disconnected from our true selves. That’s why we have problems like identity crises, depression, and all other mental + soul infirmities today.

Now here’s the mind-blowing paradox of the gospel: Jesus came to earth grasping the veil between heaven + earth. And with His death He tore it in two.

He tore the veil of holiness so that He could repair the blanket of oneness that was broken in Eden — and make it a wedding veil for His bride.

This right here is the account of man. The story of why we hurt ourselves + others. The reason for our loneliness, selfishness, self-pity.

And I see now that the solution to depression, hurt, and every other way that our hearts can hurt, is to receive Love.

This, dear friends, is how we can thrive in a hard world with the integrity of our sensitive hearts intact. How we can bloom, not just for ourselves, but as a blessing to others.

We need to receive that blanket of oneness from Jesus. Let it always wrap around us, heal us, turn our eyes away from ourselves and toward our Abba who loves us so.