“And in the end, we were all just humans… drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
Only one fix remains,
In all of what brokenness contains,
Only one thing will do,
It’s what we hold to be true.
Love is that thing that’s truthfully real,
It’s what we know will always heal,
So brokenness need not be despair,
Because the Son of God does care.
Love is personified in the historical tradition and in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ – God the Father’s Son.
If we wish to be healed – to have our brokenness reconciled – we ought to fall in love with a Saviour who fell in love with us to the point of dying on a cross. And grace does more! Although we cannot live a life of redeemed perfection, yet, we are forgiven and understood as we live our broken lives. God knows it’s not our fault. We are what we are and we are who we are.
As we journey with the Lord Christ into our brokenness, we decide to accept ourselves for whom and what we are. We give up trying to be better. We decide that God must know. We know that God knew what he was doing in being crucified. Acceptance for the facts we have accepted by faith is a grand blessing. It sees to it that there is an abiding peace we enjoy from within. God planned us to be redeemed, broken and doubting and unlovable, but redeemed in the same breath – accepted and dearly loved.
Love will address our ills and it will fix us, but what matters most is Personification of love – that Jesus is the actual Author and Producer and Finisher of this love that sacrifices itself. And healing unto wholeness is a blessing granted to the person who has been gifted access to love, precisely because they have chosen for it. They opted for life out of death.
Love comes into our lives freely and enthusiastically when we welcome it.
To say that we can seek to love and seek to be loved is the manifest evidence of the healing touch of God.
We can know in our brokenness that love works by knowledge of things past, as well as those things future, by the way we handle the present. We ease into feelings of joyful acceptance, where they are possible, in our grief, and in times of advancement we ponder reflectfully.
The only ‘fix’ for the brokenness of the inner self – the vessel that needs God – is the only one that works. But we must praise God there is one way – Jesus, the Way, the Truth, the Life (John 14:6).
Brokenness is what makes salvation the beautiful contemplative experience it is. Just muse over it now! We have need of a Saviour. We knew it by the way he loved humanity enough to die for it; for each and every single one.
Jesus heals the broken, in this life by the knowledge that God cares enough to love us into redemption, and in the next life by providing us room to be with him so that we finally transcend our brokenness in the fabulous reality of resurrected perfection.
We can be ever fascinated by God’s love, that, he who stooped and scooped us up, has accepted our worst and has believed in our best.
***
There is something infinitely helpful in the brokenness of the inner self. It is Christ’s finished and redemptive work of the cross. Redemption into God has seen us delivered where we were once vanquished, pardoned by the Judge of all judges, and restored to more life than we can comprehend.
© 2014 S. J. Wickham.
Originally posted at http://epitemnein-epitomic.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/my-brokenness-his-love-my-healing.html
Bio
Steve Wickham is a Baptist Pastor in Perth Australia who holds Degrees in Science, Divinity, and Counseling. His passion is encouraging people to become the best they want to be.
When I was diagnosed with M.E. (Myalgic Encephalitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as it is now more commonly called) in 1989 I was a teenager with everything to live for. And yet, as I walked home from school one September day, my steps slowed and slowed until I staggered bent double into our house, feeling like I had aged 60 years in ten minutes. I never attended school again. But my headmaster’s reaction was that there was nothing wrong with me. He, like many of the other raft of medics from a range of different specialisms I was to see in the next two years, concluded:’ It’s all in your head.’
Once you have been told something often enough, particularly by those in a position of expertise and ‘authority’ over you, you take it deep inside yourself. My plaintive cry ‘but I don’t want to be like this’ held no value in their eyes. The fact there was a huge disconnect between what I was feeling in my body and what they were telling me was just in effect something I was making up, drove me to believe that indeed it was my head, my mind, that was at fault: I felt I was going mad. And so my heart very nearly broke and my spirit was utterly crushed. Despite all the fantastic loving support from family and close friends, still, the insidiousness of the little phrase ‘it’s all in your head’ (meaning it is actually somehow my fault that I am ill and that subconsciously I want to be ill): that belief has taken over twenty years of therapy to excavate from my soul. I carry within myself the brokenness that has engendered such self doubt over the years.
The consequences of this inner-soul quaking are numerous and wide ranging. I hope that I look on myself and others, indeed the whole of creation, with a little more compassion; although I am only too well aware that I often do not look hard enough for the pain and damage in others, and I still, God forgive me, often fail to take this into consideration when I am too quick to judge them.
Mostly where an understanding of brokenness reveals itself to me is in my creative life, where I am drawn to look below the surface of things, asking myself, and those who look at my work, to pause, however fleetingly, to find where God is in all of this. So I now understand why I have always been drawn to rust, and peeling paint, and barbed wire coils, and skips full of discarded objects, since I first started taking photographs as a teenager, even before I was ill. Perhaps a connection with frailty has always been ‘in my head’?
In the last year Christine Valters Paintner wonderful book Eyes of the Heart introduced me to the ancient Japanese art of wabi sabi, a deliberate expression of imperfection and impermanence; beauty is found in incompleteness, in humble things, and needs to be searched for in the least expected places. It demands a change of heart and mind to look through the surface of the world.
Sounds like Kingdom thinking to me.
And so now I have a contemplative name for what I have been attracted to for many years – it’s not just all in my head.
I was reminded of this at Christmas when a friend who is a wood-turner gave me a bowl he had made of Lacewood. (Lacewood is another name for London Plane trees, so called because the pressure they are under when they grow and form a new branch leave ‘wounds’ patterned like lace.) He said he had to give me this bowl because the beauty of this particular one was to be found in this wood’s scar tissue: that the so called ‘flaws’ are all about new growth happening. Needless to say I cried.
And it reminded me too of the comfort I draw from Richard Rohr’s story that the Navaho Indians always leave a deliberate ‘mistake’ in the pattern at the corner of their woven rugs so that the Spirit can enter in: all such rugs are considered incomplete without the Spirit embedded within them.
This is the ultimate Gospel paradox: we cannot be whole until we see, really recognise, the scars, the flaws and the brokenness are all part of the new creation we are called to be.
Kate Kennington Steer is a writer and photographer with a deep abiding passion for contemplative photography and spirituality. She writes about these things on her shot at ten paces blog.
It is that time of year in Seattle – Spring is in the air and we are getting ready for our annual Spirituality of Gardening seminar April 12th. Space is limited so sign up soon. This is alway a popular event.
Several years ago Tom and I had the privilege of visiting St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert. This is one of the oldest working monasteries in existence, and monastic life in the area dates back to the 4th century. Evidently at one point there were something like 3,000 hermits living in the hills around the site. However the history, of St Catherine’s monastery goes much further back than that. Tradition has it that St Catherine’s monastery sits at the base of Mt Sinai. Many believe that is also the site for Moses’s encounter with god in the midst of the burning bush.
I was thinking about this over the weekend and wondering what it must have been like for the Israelites to live out in the desert. It had never struck me before that God did not send them out without a well seasoned guide. Moses had lived out in the desert before, and if tradition is correct then he brought them back to the same part of the desert that he was familiar with. Maybe he even brought them back to the home that he had lived in for all those years, the place where he raised his family, the place where he know how to live without allowing the desert to consume him.
Moses would have known how to find water, how to track the animals and how to provide shelter. And not only did Moses provide guidance and leadership for them, but God also provided a pillar of cloud to guide them through the day and a pillar of fire to light the night. Talk about overkill, but a people who were not used to desert life probably needed a lot of help in finding their way.
As I thought about this I was reminded of the Australian explorers who ventured into the desert interior of my country. Some of them took aboriginal guides with them, native peoples who knew how to recognize the tracks of animals and signs that water was close. These explorers survived. Others, like Burke and Wills, took no aboriginal guides. They perished in the wilderness.
God does not send us out into the desert to die either. We are not without lots of well seasoned guides either. It is reassuring to know that thousands have walked out into the desert, led by God, before us and not only survived but thrived and grown in intimacy with God as a result of their experiences.
My own guides are many and varied. There are those I know only by the stories I have read – people like Moses and Aaron who not only guided the Israelites so many thousands of years ago but who continue to inspire and direct us. Others like the Celtic saint Patrick, whose life we celebrate in a couple of weeks, Elizabeth Fry, and modern day saints like Mother Teresa, have guided not just my life but all our lives in wilderness times. For most of us there are other lesser known guides too, like our parents, pastors and friends who have walked both beside and ahead of us through the desert places.
Who are the Moses figures in your life who have wandered in the desert ahead of you and established a home for you? Who are the ones you can rely on to find water, food and shelter for you in desert places? Take some time to give thanks to God for them today.
Today’s prayer is the first of a series taken from the Lenten prayer cards we published.
It is adapted from a longer litany for Lent that I wrote several years ago which appears in the Lenten devotional A Journey Into Wholeness.
A couple of years ago I came across this beautiful prayer written by Deborah Hirt, Intern at Franciscans International. It is no longer posted on their website but I think it is such a wonderful rendition of the Francis prayer that I like to repost it each year.
Lord, make me an instrument of peace:
Bless all women who daily strive to bring peace to their communities, their homes and their hearts. Give them strength to continue to turn swords into plowshares.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love:
We pray for all women who face prejudice, inequality and gender disparities. Help us seeand to face the discrimination against women inall the many forms it may take.
Where there is injury, pardon:
Comfort all women who suffer from the pain of war, violence, and abuse. Help them to become instruments of their own reconciliation and peace.
Where there is division, unity:
Forgive all women and men who let differences breed hate and discrimination. Let your example of valuing all of creation help us to see that we are equal partners in the stewardship of your world.
Where there is darkness, light; where there is untruth, truth:
Comfort all women who struggle in the darkness of abuse, poverty, and loneliness. May we stand with them in light to acknowledge their suffering and strive to remove the burdens of shame or embarrassment.
Where there is doubt, true faith:
We pray for all women who live in fear of their husbands, fathers, and forces that control their lives. Help them to be empowered to be their true selves through your everlasting love and faith.
Where there is despair, hope:
We pray for all women who live in the despair of poverty, violence, trafficking, slavery,and abuse. May the light of your love bring them hope.
Where there is sadness, new joy:
Help us to see the strength and goodness in all women and men.
Transform our hearts to celebrate the love and grace of all people.
And may we be blessed with the courage of St. Clare of Assisi to follow our own path of love for you and all sisters and brothers.
Image via http://www.101woonideeen.nl/blog/woonbeurs-humade-and-kintsugi.html
There is an ancient Japanese art, from the 15th century, called Kintsugi. It is, essentially, the art of taking broken pieces of porcelain and remaking them into pots. These are usually sealed with gold resin.
It is said, a vessel fixed by Kintsugi will be more beautiful, more precious, than before it was broken.
And when I first found out about Kintsugi, the first thing I thought – (apart from ‘Wow, that’s a strange word’) – was how this reminded me of grace. And how this one word, and what it means, can give us hope of a new tomorrow.
We are broken people, living in a broken world. We’ve all messed up, made mistakes, got regrets. In some way all of us have participated in the fallen-ness of this world. And we’re all in need of grace.
Grace is at the heart of our faith. It’s where our journey of discipleship must begin. And it can only begin when we allow God to shine the light of grace on our brokenness. We all know where we struggle, where we’ve made mistakes. There may be some mistakes we were never aware of, but we all have regrets, actions we wish we’d left undone, words we wish we’d never said, thoughts we wish we’d never had.
And we can keep running from them. Hiding in the dark, keeping these issues away from the light, and denying they even happened. We call this ‘burying the past’, but all this does is build up inside, until it begins to control us, haunt us, and overwhelm us.
If we are wanting to truly grow, if we want to know the most intimacy a person can have with the divine, we must be willing to let Him shine His light of grace on our lives. To expose ourselves to the truth about ourselves – both the bad, but also the good.
The good is that we are already loved. Already accepted. Already have infinite value and worth. We did when we were conceived, and we always have had. We never have to prove ourselves to anyone, and we need have no fear. Because we are and always will be loved, valuable, and precious.
When we allow the light of grace to expose this truth, we discover hope. We discover the opportunity of a new tomorrow. We see a new story can be written.
God takes the broken pieces of our lives, and puts them together, to make something more beautiful than we could ever have imagined. This process takes a lifetime, journeying with the divine, falling down and getting up again. Being broken, and repaired, again and again.
So this lent, allow God to shine the light of His grace on you. Let Him expose the truth of both your brokenness and your infinite value.
And allow Him to reshape you, to make a new creation. More beautiful than you ever realised. More precious than you will ever understand.
Submit yourself, to God’s Kintsugi of Grace.
James Prescott is a writer, author and blogger. He blogs regularly at www.jamesprescott.co.uk on encouragement, telling a better story, and discovering hope in a broken world. His first full length book, “Mosaic of Grace: God’s Beautiful Reshaping of Our Broken Lives” is available later this year. For more information, check out his blog and follow him on Twitter at @JamesPrescott77
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