Harden Not Your Heart
This year has been marked by immense grief — storms I never could have prepared for, no matter how strong I thought I was.
At the start of the year, my grandma, my ba ngoai, passed away from lung cancer. Even though I knew her prognosis wasn’t any good, nothing could have prepared me for the quiet finality of her absence. Watching my mom grieve her own mom broke something in me. There’s a kind of pain in seeing her cry that shakes you to your core. Because you know deep down that one day, you will become her too — standing in her place, feeling that same ache.
By spring, my world shifted again. My relationship — the one I thought would last forever — unraveled. The person I thought I’d marry, the one I imagined my whole future with, slowly became a stranger. It was jarring, disorienting, and heartbreakingly cruel. Because while he was still very much alive, the dreams we shared and the love we built had died. It was its own kind of loss — one that left me engulfed in a deep and overwhelming sadness.
Losing people I love has never been easy for me. It would be easy to assume that I am unaffected and unshaken. I like to pretend I’m unfazed, to keep a brave, almost flippant front. But behind closed doors, my inner world was chaos. Grief crept into everything. And I found myself wondering, again and again — how do you nurse a broken heart? Surely a pint of Ben & Jerry’s could fix it, right? Or maybe a spontaneous trip with friends? I kept searching for something — anything — that might make the pain feel smaller.
As I moved through the stages of grief, I started to feel bitterness creeping in and taking over my sadness. My heart was tired — tired of breaking, tired of bruising, tired of love. It felt like I was constantly being tested, haunted by a string of losses I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
And slowly, I became the very thing my ex once called me — as a joke, two years ago — the thing I vowed I’d never become: cold.
Ironically, being cold felt safer. If I stopped caring, I couldn’t get hurt again. If I built walls high enough, no one could break them. When I saw him cozying up to someone new, just a few months after we ended, I couldn’t even bring myself to cry. I stared at the image and the caption — and felt nothing. No anger. No sadness. Just emptiness. My heart, once so tender and full of feeling, had hardened without me even realizing it. But the truth is, indifference is just grief in disguise — a quieter, lonelier kind of pain.
When my friend Jill confirmed that he had started dating her, it didn’t come as a shock. What struck me more was how nervous she was to tell me — tears were streaming down her face, her voice trembling, as if she were the one about to break my heart. But I just sat there, still. Numb.
“How do you feel?” she asked quietly after sharing the news.
“Honestly,” I said, “my heart is hardened. I have no tears left to shed. I can’t feel anything.”
She cried those tears for me. It was the mark of a true friend, someone who could grieve and help carry the weight of my loss when I no longer could. And in that period, I felt a tug in my heart. The love that my friend had for me began the thawing process of my icy interior.
Afterwards, I went to Mass. I slipped into a pew and opened my Mass journal, thumbing through the pages to preview the readings. And then I saw the responsorial psalm: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
It stopped me in my tracks. It felt like a direct message from God, piercing through the fog I’d been living in. Harden not your hearts. As if He was speaking to me — reminding me that bitterness isn’t strength, that I didn’t need to keep wearing this armor. That it was time to soften again. In that moment, I realized I didn’t want to stay cold. I didn’t want to let pain turn me into someone unrecognizable. Maybe healing isn’t about moving on quickly or pretending not to care. Maybe it’s about choosing, every single day, to stay open — to feel, to forgive, to begin again.
Because God wasn’t asking me to forget the hurt. He was asking me to let it transform me — not into someone harder, but into someone holier.
And as I carried this verse with me throughout the week, I finally allowed myself to feel. To feel the loss. The disappointment. The ache of unfulfilled dreams. I let it all in, not because it was easy, but because it was human. I let myself come undone, to sit in the rawness of my own heart, so that I could slowly, gently, begin to piece myself back together again.
What I’ve learned through all of this is that Christ doesn’t promise a life free of heartbreak. He promises His presence within it. He meets us right there — in the pain, in the numbness, in the silence when we can’t even pray. He doesn’t demand perfection or composure. He simply asks us to come to Him with whatever is left of our hearts, no matter how hardened or bruised they’ve become.
Because it’s in those moments — when we finally surrender our pain to Him — that He begins to make something new. He takes the broken pieces and, with gentleness and patience, shapes them into something beautiful. Christ’s love is not afraid of our bitterness or our anger. He knows the sting of betrayal, the ache of loss, the weight of sorrow. And still, He chooses to love. That’s the lesson He keeps teaching me: that love — real, Christ-like love — means keeping our hearts soft even when the world gives us every reason to harden them.
So if you find yourself hardened by life, sitting in the pew like I once did, unable to feel anything — listen for His voice. Let Him in. Because the heart that turns toward Christ will never stay cold for long.
P.S. I would be remiss not to say that I couldn’t have made it through this difficult year without the steadfast love of my family and friends — Juju, Jill, Marie, Caro, Joanna, Adri, Saunthy, Steph, Taylor, Huy, Christina, Emma, Aileen, and Bella. Thank you for nursing me back to life, consoling my broken heart, and filling my days with laughter and light when I was walking through darkness. What a gift it is to be loved by you all.
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Emily
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