The Shelter of Brokenness
Recently I had the privilege of spending four days in the central Arizona mountains with fourteen teenagers. Time in the woods, someone else doing the cooking, dozens of opportunities for conversation and challenging my fears…what could be better?
Searching for a quiet spot to connect with Papa-God before the kids were out and about, I found an outcropping of split and eroded rock in the sunshine away from the road. In every depression and crack soil had collected and something had sprouted, most often agave, or cactus. The place was a natural rock garden! Very near me was a place where broken lichen-covered rocks had formed a shelter for a collection of tiny, fledgling plants. Not far away were bigger plants of the same kind, growing vigorously enough to break apart the rock in which they had rooted!
Paul tells us that our old man is broken beyond rescue and is continuing to decay daily. In the meantime our new man is being renewed every day to look more and more like its creator, also, that our small afflictions are being invested in God’s plan to generate great beauty and treasure as dividends.
John tells us that living in the light of reality brings us community and healing.
Hebrews tells us that life together is how we succeed at our task; one beggar tells another where to find bread.
We are broken people. As soon as we acknowledge it and cry out for God’s help, the healing and transformation process begins, but it is never a solitary event. He does not mean us to be alone, or to pretend we are something we are not.
Tragedies and traumas break us. Troubles and trials eat at us and wear us away.
It is our brokenness that God desires to heal and beautify and use to bring new life.
Here, next to me on Mingus Mountain, was a picture of the church, God’s rescued and reformed people: one broken rock having fallen to lean on another, the soil generated by the tiny symbiotic lives that we can’t get rid of caught between us, making a shelter for new, tender life to grow.
Let today be a day that you embrace your brokenness, cry out to God for rescue, share it honestly with another Jesus-seeker, and trust that Papa-God is using it all to grow His people, the Church.
Following (and finding) Jesus every day in the everyday,
Christi
P.S. Where have you seen Him?
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