We are born with open hearts, but something soon happens that causes us to start to close it off, to protect it from being hurt. Our parent seems to prefer one of our siblings more than us; our teacher tells us not to sing—just to mouth the words; the coach keeps us on the bench no matter how hard we try; our first crush doesn’t even know we exist; our first love dumps us for someone else; we get fired from the best job we ever had; our children get lost on the way to finding themselves; one blow after another as we go through life causing us to shut down our hearts. Because rejection, failure, loss, bitterness, resentment, fear are hard to cope with, we build protective barriers around our hearts that no one can penetrate. Our biblical heroes were not immune to such hurts. Just look at the examples in our scriptures today. In our lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, David was first put down by King Saul before he faced the arrogant giant, Goliath. Paul, in our epistle lesson, pours out his pain to the Corinthians for the way he has been treated in his traveling ministry. In our gospel passage, Jesus finds that his closest disciples don’t yet get God’s message of love. Our examples, each and all, came to realize that God alone could make a difference in their lives. As David Frenette puts it in his book The Path of Centering Prayer (p.108): “Every aspect of the human condition can be discovered in God, including the challenges of suffering, despair, doubt, death, illness, and injustice.” Only as they opened their hearts to God, offering themselves body, mind, and spirit to the Beloved could they begin to forgive those who had hurt them and incarnate divine love in the world around them. God is waiting for us to open wide our hearts and welcome the healing, life-giving love prepared for us from the beginning. As we awaken to the divine balm encompassing us, we can begin to let go of the pain we have held so closely and allow our self-protecting barriers to dissolve one layer at a time in the light of God’s love, accepting the healing of our woundedness, neediness, and self-centeredness through our mysterious encounter with God’s grace, mercy and forgiveness. May we come to appreciate with joy and thanksgiving all the ways God works in our lives as we open wide our hearts and allow ourselves to be brought to wholeness and holiness, trusting in “the sure foundation of [God’s] loving-kindness” just as David, Paul, and Jesus did.