Broken is Better than Brittle

In my mind’s eye, I see the earth baked hard and brown for the vast expanse of it. If rain were to fall, it would cause rivulets of water to stream unchecked right over the brittle surface, falling down and away in a crystal stream over the edge.

Brittle can’t absorb water like broken can. Break that earth, and it will absorb the water, softening its depths into soil made rich for seeds to grow.

Life broke me for awhile. I rather know what it’s like to want to bash my head into the wall to relieve the pain and pressure. I kinda know that feeling of wondering what it would be like if that semi headed my way on the highway just crashed into my car. Of asking God, “Why is she dying of cancer, and not me?”

I know how to conjure every possible way to avoid and eliminate the things causing pain. I know how to spend endless hours of tension trying to tell my heart everything’s OK—when I’m not OK.

Sometimes life brings the unexpected. The phone call comes, and your brother’s disappeared into eighty feet of foreign water. You think he’ll surely come walking along the bank, but he doesn’t, and after three days they pull his limp body out.

You bury him on the mountain side, and stare at his coffin. It refuses to open, forever. His phone rings and your mother needs to answer it and tell one more person that her son is gone—and he’s not coming back. The mountain side is wet, dark, and smelly, a blur of people until you climb into that long bus, head to a house you don’t know, hit the pillow, and ask for sleep.

Broken is what we were. Here, there was no place for avoidance, no way to pressure the heart into being OK. We accepted it.

Flying through the clouds toward US soil, I realized that my heart felt as soft as they appeared. No need to bash my head against the wall or spend nights trying to find a mental way out. I was no longer afraid of being broken. I just was.

Here, I learned that broken is OK. Broken is better than brittle. Broken means love gets to pour in and grace holds my hand. Broken means truth over takes denial, and truth always, always sets us free—even if the truth is that we’re so broken we don’t know a way out, or around, or over.

The broken end is the first and only way to a whole new beginning. This is why, my friends, we need never, ever be afraid of broken things. Saving grace delivers us not only from sin, but from those places we avoid, skirt around, or deny.

Saving grace helps us acknowledge the pain, then release the pain.