Heart Cries & Heart Victories

Norma Dougherty • Oct 08, 2019

Emoji’s: Simple pictures that express a thousand words. This one speaks to the broken hearts we often face when trials and chaos strike our lives. I see it used on social media a lot. People are hurting. Daily! Facing fear, panic, worry, pain and extreme sadness causes heart cries.

Heart cries—times when we have so much chaos in our life’s circumstances that we cry out to God to help us. We’ve all experienced them. Learning to walk on the chaos of heart cries with God is such a faith-building experience.

  •  Heart cries cause us to surrender our will to his providence when we recognize our need for him; when we fall into the beauty of his loving arms, into the protection of his power to see us through our heart cries.
  • Heart cries are the trials God allows in our lives to lead us toward spiritual heart victories.

Heart victories — these are the triumphant life lessons we learn during our difficult heart cries; the “ah-ha” moments when the light bulb comes on to let us see more clearly.

  •  Heart victories shine a brighter light into our character. They are teaching tools used by God to develop more persistence, giving us greater hope and wisdom.
  •  Heart victories make us stronger in our faith and in our life. Our goal in any of our trials is to discover these heart victories.
  •  Heart victories are best discovered in relationship with God as our teacher.

In my book Island Girl: A Triumph of the Spirit I share several of my own heart victories gained through chaos and trials. We all journey through heart cries in various ways. God knows which lesson each of us must learn. He knows how to shape our character whereby we reach that magical moment of surrender, a level of brokenness when we rely on him, recognize our need for him and give our life over to him. Did you know this is our perfect sacrifice? It is the sacrifice God loves more than anything else we can offer him. In the Psalms, King David wrote:

“My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you God, will not despise.” (Psalm 51:17 NIV)

Sometimes the level of brokenness is so deep we are angry with God. We don’t even want to acknowledge him. We may even wish to shake our fist at God. However, he tells us that we can have his all-surpassing power to deal with our brokenness. 

“We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9 NIV)

I hope as you ride the wave of chaos in your life, you will turn your heart cry emoji into an emoji of prayer — prayer to a heavenly father who wants to walk with you through it all until you too can claim beautiful, magnificent heart victories. Yield! Surrender! Give it all to him!

Want to learn more? You can download a free chapter entitled The True Victory from my book Island Girl: A Triumph of the Spirit

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