How to Heal a Broken Heart When Life Keeps Hurting | Just Nona | Nona Jones

You're praying. You're showing up with faith. You're doing the work. And yet — disappointment keeps showing up too. Heartache. Loneliness. Unmet expectations. Emotional fatigue.

And after a while, a tension begins to build. Because you want your heart to stay open and surrendered. But the hurt is real. The loneliness is real. The ache is real. And if you were honest, you might find yourself asking: How do I keep my heart aligned with God when it keeps getting broken?

In this episode of Just Nona, I'm answering a heart question from a listener named Lanika, who is trying to hold both honesty and faith at the same time — and is asking one of the most important questions in the life of a believer: How do you address your feelings honestly and still anchor into God's steadfast love? How do you battle loneliness without just spiritualizing it away?

This is not a conversation about performing faith. It is a conversation about what it looks like to bring your whole heart to God — not the edited version.

We talk about:
Why your feelings are not the problem — and what they are actually trying to tell you
The unique exhaustion that comes from repeated emotional hits, not one big moment but many small ones
How spiritualizing pain instead of processing it quietly disconnects you from God and from yourself
What David's raw, unfiltered prayer in Psalm 13 reveals about honesty as a form of faith
Why God's love is not fragile — and what that means for the real version of you
The practical pattern of feel, express, and anchor — and why suppressing skips the most important step
And what loneliness is actually an invitation to, beyond just human connection

You are not too emotional. You are not weak. And you are not failing spiritually because you feel deeply.

Healing doesn't happen in what you hide. It happens in what you bring.


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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey friend, this is Nona, and I'm so glad that you're here. Uh this podcast exists to provide a safe space where people can ask the hard questions that they're carrying in their heart and receive biblical wisdom from me, a friend. Uh in order for this podcast to be distributed as far and wide as possible. Ratings and reviews really, really matter. So when you can, please leave a rating and also leave a comment because I love to read your feedback. I hope that you give it five stars, but whatever rating you give it, it really, really matters. So please just take a minute and let me know what you think, okay? I'm so glad you're here. Enjoy the show. There are some seasons where it feels like your heart just can't catch a break. You're doing the work, you're praying, you're trying to stay grounded in God, you're showing up with faith, and yet disappointment keeps showing up too. Heartache keeps showing up, loneliness, unmet expectations, emotional fatigue. And it's happening again and again. And after a while, attention begins to build. Because you want to trust God. You want your heart to remain open and soft and surrendered, but the disappointment is real. The loneliness is real, the ache is real. And if you were honest, you might find yourself asking, How do I keep my heart pure toward God when it keeps getting hurt? Especially when God has the power to prevent it from happening. Well, today's episode is for anyone who is trying to hold both honesty and faith at the same time. Let's talk about it. Welcome to Just Nona. But we're just afraid to ask. I cannot tell you how many people have either commented or messaged me saying that they have found their way back to hope in Jesus because of the answers provided on this show. Up until now, this show has been entirely funded by me. But God has placed a really big vision in my heart to expand it globally. And I simply can't do it without you. So if you have been blessed by this show, would you consider partnering with me by giving a gift of any amount to help us grow the reach and impact of this ministry? If yes, there's two ways to help. If you're watching on YouTube, just click the donate button, or you can head over to nonajones.com and click the give button at the top of the site. Now, when you go to nonajones.com and give there, you can either give a one-time gift of any amount, or if you really believe in this ministry and want to support in a deeper way, you can become a ministry partner by signing up to give monthly. I would be so, so grateful. May God bless you for your generosity. All right, back to the show. Today's heart question comes to us from a beautiful sister named Lanika. Lanika, welcome to the show. What questions on your heart?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Hi, Nona. This is Lanika, and I have a question that I have struggled with throughout my journey of just being a great disciple and a woman of God, a child of God. I want to ask you, how do I keep my heart postured and aligned with God when constant heartaches, trials, and tribulations seem very personal? How do I battle the loneliness? And how do I stay aligned and teach and raise up my kids when God is a non-negotiable in my home? Through a bad divorce of five years of a man calling the cops on me? How do I stay aligned? How do I, after all the times that I say to myself, I don't want to do something that I know I should? How do I retain myself and lean and align myself with God who I know has my friend? The God who I choose to remember. How do I believe and stay staying and aligned with God? How do I keep my heart pure, faithful, and non-tenting?

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Lanika, first of all, thank you so much for your willingness to be vulnerable and ask a question that I am pretty sure many people are secretly carrying in their hearts, but are afraid to articulate because they don't want to seem somehow ungrateful to God or even that there is somehow a tension between their faith and their lived experience. So thank you for asking that question. And also I just want to say that I'm really sorry for what you're having to walk through, um, what you went through in your marriage. And um just just know that as I was preparing my notes for this, I was uh praying for you and with you. Um so thank you again for asking this question. Um, I think the question that you asked is, you know, how do I deal with um what I feel? But I I believe that the question that's beneath that question is really, can I be honest about how I feel? Can I be honest about how I feel and still be close to God? And so um I want to start with an acknowledgement, which is that how you feel is not the problem. Your feelings are not the problem. Your disappointment is not the problem. Your discouragement, even your anger is not the problem. Emotions are not problems. Emotions are simply indicators that there is something happening within our soul. Our soul is tripart. So we are a tripart being ourselves. We are a spirit in our essence. We are a spirit. Um, we have a body, which is the vessel that carries our spirit. And at the intersection, the connective point, the connective tissue between the spirit and the body is the soul. And our soul consists of our mind, that's what we think, that's our thought life, as well as our will, uh, what we do, the um, the conduct that uh we have in the world, uh, and also our emotions, how we feel. Um, so your emotions live in your soul. And I want to make sure that I say that because I do believe that there is, there's a lot of error in um in the church, where there's this idea that if you somehow feel sad or lonely, or if you somehow feel angry, that that is somehow a mark of spiritual immaturity. And that's not a mark of spiritual immaturity, that is actually a sign that you have a soul. Okay. So I want to start there. Um, emotions are really just the way that the body processes experiences. And um I want to just break this down in a few tangible ways. So, for example, sadness. Sadness is the way that our body processes the experience of loss. Um, loneliness is the way that our body processes a feeling of disconnection because we were created to be in community. And so we feel lonely when we experience disconnection. Um, and then disappointment is how our body processes unmet expectations. So you feel that because that's what you experienced. You experienced unmet expectations. And so disappointment is simply the way that your body is processing that. So feeling what you feel is actually not a sign of a lack of faith. It simply is uh an indicator that you're a human being. And uh I think that actually the worst state that we can be in is one where we don't feel, where we have either anesthetized ourselves against emotions or we have somehow believed the lie that how we feel is a signal of um a lack of faith or um some sort of disconnect from God. So um I do believe that there is a very uh unique kind of exhaustion that can come from experiencing um painful emotions repeatedly. And that kind of sounds like what you have been carrying is that you've gone from experiences of sadness to loss, to grief, uh, perhaps anxiety, overwhelm. And it seems like it's been on instant repeat. Um, and so it's not just one big moment where you had that experience, but it is uh perhaps a big moment supplemented by smaller moments. Uh, and then you kind of add to that some medium-sized moments, and it just feels like it's kind of this relentless onslaught uh of pain. And of course, that can lead to the question, man, how many times do I have to go through this? When is this going to be over? Um, and then the idea when you kind of marry your experience with what we're taught in church, which is basically you shouldn't feel that way. Um, you can feel like something is wrong with you because of how you feel. Um, I had a very painful series of events happen to me. Um, this was maybe, I don't know, two years ago, where the Lord um called me out of uh corporate leadership, which was my vision for my life. I thought I would be in, you know, the corporate world forever. Um He called me out of corporate leadership into full-time ministry and specifically called me to um to serve women, women leaders, women who were similar to me, women who were in leadership in corporate America or in ministry or entrepreneurs. And I remember um when that happened, I was so excited because I finally had clarity about what it is that God wanted me to do. And at the time, I had uh a member of my ministry team who was very dear to me, um, considered like a family member, very close to me. And I just assumed uh that that person would be um on the journey with me into the future. And as it turned out, right around that exact same time that God gave me clarity about what he was calling me to, uh, this person who I thought would be with me forever uh resigned and um essentially said, it wasn't like a bad thing, but essentially said that they didn't feel called to what God had called me to. And um, I remember, first of all, just being shocked because, you know, I never even considered that happening. It never even occurred to me that that would happen. As a matter of fact, in my mind, we were going to build the future together. And so when that resignation came, it not only caught me off guard, but I think it um it unearthed um some feelings of rejection and abandonment that I had not quite processed, um, that I think I bypassed. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Um, and so when that happened, I I felt that. Then fast forward like, I don't know, maybe two months, so not long after, um I went over my my then best friend's home. And uh, you know, I had been in a really busy travel season. There had been a lot going on. And so um, you know, I I think that day, I remember that day specifically, I had like back-to-back meetings. And um I was running late. And so I I texted her. I didn't, I didn't like text her after we were supposed to meet. I think I texted her earlier in the day and I asked if we could um like move the time back or something like that, and she couldn't because of things she had to do. So I said, okay. So then I just told her that I was going to be late because of the things I had to do. And so when I got to her home, um, she proceeded to tell me essentially that she was offended that I was late. She felt like um, you know, the fact that I was sometimes late, like to if we had like lunch or dinner and I'd be running late, uh, that that was somehow an indicator that I guess I didn't value her. Um, but the thing is, like I would always give ample notice because I'm not the type of person, like I'm not gonna, like if we're meeting at six, I'm not gonna text you at 6'10 and be like, hey, I'm running late, because that's obvious. Um, I'll probably text you around 515 to say, hey, I I'm running late, or maybe 540, if like I'm literally heading out the door. Hey, I'm gonna be 10 minutes late. But um she said that. She said some other things that um that deeply hurt me, one of which was essentially that um that she wasn't my best friend. And and that that again just caught me really, really off guard. I I wasn't prepared for that. Um, I'm the kind of person that because of my history, my childhood um pain, I don't get close to people very easily. And so the fact that I had opened my heart to her, and that was my experience, was very, very, very painful. And so, you know, again, two months prior, the person who I thought would, you know, be on my team forever resigns. Then my best friend um basically tells me that she's not my best friend. And then a few months after that, I had another member of my team um quit essentially without notice. Um, and it it was deeply troubling for me because that was someone who I had supported in so many ways. Um, referring, you know, business to them from friends of mine to try to help them build their business. Um, even things that they would do for me that maybe weren't done the way that I would have liked them to be done, I kind of just excused it because I was like, you know, they have a lot going on. So giving a lot of grace. And when that happened, again, it was just, it was additive, right? It was thing after thing after thing. Um, I got to a place where I think I became really angry and resentful. And I'm just sharing all of this transparently because I think when we have these successive uh experiences of pain, especially when we try to act like we're not bothered by it. Like I remember when my uh when the first resignation happened, I tried to act like I was okay. Uh when my best friend said that she was my best friend, I tried to act like I was okay. And then when that last thing happened, I think that was like that was like the blow that shattered the, the, the house that had all the cracks in the glass. That was the blow that did it. So I became resentful and I felt my heart begin to harden to where I was like, you know what? If this is how people are going to treat me, then I'm just not gonna care about people. Like, I'm gonna be the kind of person that I'm just gonna use people. I'm gonna be the kind of person that, you know, I'm going to be hurt if you don't do what I want you to do the way you want to do. Like, I just decided, I was like, I'm gonna let this change me. And then God in his just just love and mercy, he was like, Nona, but that's not who you are. You you don't have a hard heart. Like, that's just not who you are. So, in order for you to become that, you would literally have to become a different person. And I'm sharing all of this with you because I think you you know this intuitively, but you have to be very, very careful. Proverbs 4 and 23, it tells us, and I'm actually gonna read it, um, but it tells us above all else, guard your heart, for out of it flows everything that you do. And I'm gonna read this. This is the uh the NIV version. Uh the NIV version, it says, yes, above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it. Everything you do flows from it. And so we have to be very, very, very careful to not allow the disappoints, the discouragements, the, the loneliness, the pain, the betrayals, um, the blame. The we we can't allow that to change our heart because everything we do flows from our heart, because our heart is who we are. Um, we also have to be very careful that we don't bypass our pain. Um, what I have seen many of us do instead of process our pain, we'll say things like, Oh, I'm fine, you know, I'm over it, uh, I trust God, God is good. And we say these things with a smile when our heart is actually broken within us. Um it's important, and this is why, Lenika, your question is so important. It's important that we give language to how we feel with with honesty, with honesty. Um, because pain that we don't process becomes an identity distortion. Here's what, here's what, here's how it goes. We feel pain, okay? And then we say, I shouldn't feel like this. And so what we do is we then say, if I was a good Christian or if I had more faith, I would not feel this way, I would not struggle like this. So therefore, something must be wrong with me, or something must be wrong with my faith. And then we land on the conclusion, well, maybe I'm not as spiritually strong as I thought I was because of how I feel. That is identity malformation. We begin to see ourselves as deficient and defective because of the natural human experience of processing our pain. So we start to actually equate our humanity with weakness instead of allowing God to meet us in our humanity. And that is the deception because see what God wants to do is He wants us to invite Him into our humanity. I believe, thank you, Holy Spirit. I believe that the whole point of Jesus, apart from the cross and salvation, and we thank God, hallelujah, we thank God for that, the whole point of Jesus is to show us what happens when we give God residence within our flesh. Jesus wept, Jesus grieved, Jesus was angry, Jesus was disappointed, Jesus was betrayed, and yet Jesus never lost his hope, he never lost his faith, he never lost the father. So it is possible to live in the tension of uh a body that is consumed with grief and pain and uh and and and disillusionment and overwhelmed while simultaneously uh having that same body be filled by the presence of God and the power and the faith and the hope and the love of God. Jesus is our perfect model and our perfect uh example. In Psalm 13, uh David prays, How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? I I love David for many reasons. One of them is that, so there's about there's 150 psalms. Out of the 150, most people think that psalms was was written by David. They weren't all written by David. Scholars say that anywhere from 70 to 75 psalms were written by David. So let's just say we'll take the middle of the road. Let's say 73. 73 Psalms written by David. Out of 150, that means like half were written by him. And what's amazing is out of those psalms that he wrote, many of them, of course, praise God. They give God glory and worship. And many of them are psalms of lament and grief and anguish, psalms of betrayal, psalms um declaring the pain of humiliation and shame. And um David was incredibly honest with God about how he felt. And I believe this is why God Himself called David a man after his own heart. I've always found it fascinating though that for some reason in the church, we think that something is wrong with you if you. Feel these feelings that David felt. And yet God called this man who felt all the feelings that we are condemned for. He called him a man after his own heart. Why? Because David took those feelings to God. He trusted God enough to know that he could be honest with him. He trusted God enough to know that he could handle David's truth. At the end of that Psalm, at the end of Psalm 13, David said, But I trust in your unfailing love. Trust and faith are words that are used interchangeably. We say things like I have faith in God. We say things like I trust God and we mean uh the same thing. But but the words faith and trust are actually different. Faith in God is the belief that everything is going to work out according to what I'm praying for. Trust in God says, but even if it doesn't work out, God is still good. That is trust. Trust is the dark side of faith. And so in this season where I'm speaking both to Lenica, but to everyone who's watching and listening, in this season where it feels hard, um, it feels hard to carry both pain and faith at the intersection of pain and faith, I believe is trust. Lord, I would really, really, really prefer that I not have to walk through this. And you are still good while I'm walking through it. That is trust. And this will still work together for my good according to your word, Romans 8 28. And you haven't left me, you haven't forsaken me, because you are a good father, even in the midst of my pain. In Lamentations chapter 3, verses 22 through 23, the Bible says, Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. The way that we keep our heart pure before God is by remembering who he is, even in the middle of the pain. It's by remembering his faithfulness, by remembering the fact that his compassions don't fail, even when the situation has zero compassion in it. We can invite the God of compassion into the situation and experience compassion. How amazing is that? That even in a situation where there is no peace, where there's chaos, where there's confusion, I can invite the God of peace into the situation. I can invite the God who says that he doesn't give me uh confusion, but instead uh he gives me clarity and he gives me wisdom. Hallelujah. He is not the author of confusion, nor is he the author of fear. God is a God of wisdom and clarity. I could invite God into the chaos and he becomes the peace that the situation doesn't even have because I invite the presence of God into it. So how do you stay anchored? How do you stay anchored when you're in the tension of um the pain and the faith of God? Um, I believe that staying aligned with God is not about ignoring how you feel. It's not about um pretending everything is okay. Um, it's not about forcing positivity, which we like to do a lot in the church. I I don't know why we have such discomfort with people's pain. You know, I I remember one time uh had a family member, uh, we're about the same age. She's I think a little older than me, but we're about the same age. This was years ago, and uh her father passed away. And we went over her house, and um father's body laying there, literally had just taken his last breath. Uh, she was sprawled out across his body, crying agony, wailing. And um I was just in the room and I was just standing there. I wasn't saying anything. I was just standing there, and I was just experiencing that moment of grief with her. Uh and then I just laid my hand on her back and just rested it there. I didn't say anything, I just rested it there because I knew in that moment that there was nothing that I needed to say, there was nothing to be said. Uh but another family member arrived and um immediately went over to her and pulled her off of her father's body and looked her in her eyes and said, It's gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. And I saw in this family, the other family member who lost her father, I saw in her eyes a flash of rage. I saw it. She didn't say anything because the other family member was older and she was trying to be respectful. But what what we tend to do when someone's having hard feelings is we tend to try to get them out of those hard feelings because it makes us uncomfortable. And when we do that, we actually ignite deeper pain. We cause a deeper injury. And we do that not just to other people, but to ourselves. The pain that we deny, the pain that we ignore, the pain that we try to bypass, the pain that we try to, you know, paint over, whitewash over, it doesn't go away. It simply changes form. It metastasizes uh in our soul in other ways. There are some people right now who have um substance addictions because they're grieving. And they've never been given the space or the tools to process the grief, people who are alcoholics because of deep grief, people who are addicted to uh uh drugs because of deep grief, people who are committing all types of sexual sin because of deep grief, and they're just looking for a way to numb the pain. That's what it is. But that is not God's best for us. That is not God's best for you, Lanika. That is not God's best for any of us. He does not want us to numb it. Um, he wants us to trust him enough to name what you feel honestly, process it with him, not away from him, and then anchor to the truth of what God has said after you express the pain to him. Anchor to the truth after you express the pain. After you express the pain. Um, I do want to take just a minute, I'm almost done, but I want to take a minute to address loneliness. Because I think there are many of us who may be in a season of loneliness or maybe walking through loneliness, and I want to acknowledge that loneliness is not just a spiritual issue, it is literally an issue of our design. When God created the heavens and the earth, and he created uh every uh plant and herb and every animal, then he creates, you know, Adam, he creates this man. Um, it's interesting because everything God created before the man, he called good. He called everything good. Then he creates the man and he says, it is not good for man to be alone. So he creates a companion, he creates um someone who uh can be with him and he can be with her. And and so we were created uh for community. We were created to be in relationship with other people. And so when that does not happen, um, it can be disconcerting in ways that we don't understand. I know that there is this um there is this desire to not need anyone, but that desire is born out of trauma. That desire is actually born out of disappointment. That desire is often born out of rejection and abandonment. And so instead of dealing with that pain and calling it what it is and realizing that we were created for connection, we just say, I don't want to be connected as a mechanism to try to protect ourselves from pain. Um, but I want to share that there is when we experience chronic loneliness, that can be usually because of one of two reasons. Either one, because we have created a kind of protective force field around ourselves because of pain. We don't want to be hurt again. So we're not letting anybody into our space so that they can even have the potential of hurting us. That's one. But the other aspect of loneliness that we don't often want to talk about in the church is that sometimes loneliness is actually an invitation to intimacy with God. One of the things that God revealed to me after that experience I had a couple of years ago, where, you know, the person I thought would build my work with me forever resigned. And then my best friend said that she's not my best friend, and then this other person left my team. Um I experienced a level of loneliness then that I had never experienced before. Um, but God was actually inviting me into intimacy with him. And during that season, during that season, I spent so much time with God, so much time in the presence of God. One of the things that God uh even impressed upon me is that those relationships actually had to be stripped away from me because they were taking the place of him. There were times I would call my best friend about something that I should have been praying about. There were times when I would call uh, you know, uh one of my team members to discuss something with them that I should have been bringing to God, you know, to talk about. Um, but I got to a place of comfortability to where I was going to them instead of the Lord. And sometimes the Lord loves you so much that he's going to create the conditions wherein which you have nobody else to turn to but him. And so I would say um don't forsake loneliness or don't even think that it's a punishment. Oftentimes it's an invitation to intimacy with God. So here's how I want you to reframe the experience that you're having. One, instead of asking, how do I stop feeling this? I want you to ask, how do I walk with God through what I feel? Instead of declaring I shouldn't feel this way, I want you to say, my feelings are real, but they are not final. My feelings are simply an indicator of something that God is inviting me to explore, something that my experience is inviting me to explore so that I can bring it to God, I can process it with him, and then I can I can identify the truth of his word that I need to declare over this situation. Um, a few reflection questions that I want to offer to you to consider over this next week. One, what feelings have I been suppressing instead of expressing? Two, where have I confused emotional numbness with spiritual strength? Three, what would honesty with God actually sound like for me right now? And last, where do I need safe human connection in this season? You do not have to choose between honesty and faith. You can have both. And I believe God wants you. He wants you to have both. Um, because he's a good father. He's a good father. Let me just pray with you and pray over you. Um, Lord, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to spend this time with your daughter, your son. Um, I pray, God, that that you have spoken to their heart in a way that um plants a seed of encouragement, God. And that through the study of your word, through prayer, through the pursuit of your heart, God, that seed will get watered and will be nurtured and will be cultivated so it becomes a hard harvest field of trust, a harvest field of faith. Um, my prayer, God, is that we will remember that even when we are lonely, God, we're never alone. Even when we are discouraged, Father, we actually have access to the fruit of the Spirit, God. We have access to your peace, to your love, to your joy in every situation, Father. We just love you so much. I pray, Father, that um, specifically for Linika, God, I pray that you'll give her peace, give her children peace as they're navigating this very, what seems like tumultuous situation, Father. Keep our hearts pure as your word declares. Uh, test and examine our hearts, Father. I pray that you will create a clean heart within us, Father. Renew the right, steadfast spirit within us, that you will be glorified through our lives. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you all so much for joining me. And uh if no one has told you this, I want you to know that I love you and God loves you. Until next time, stay grounded and rooted in the Word of God, and I'll see you next time.