Broken Pieces

The girl on the side of the road with the black eye & bloody nose

Eagle Street

Miscarriage

Betrayal

Hand through the window

Divorce

Bulimia

Promises

The day I found his secret

When I realized I had my own

Betrayal

Repeat

Cancer

Addicted Child

Church split

Relationships

Grief

Shattered, scattered, fragments. What do you do with broken pieces?

I remember the time I asked God to show me what true beauty was. I laid down on the floor soaking in music expecting to see sparkling light and colored filled rooms of heaven, or at least a vividly colored butterfly or something- you know, the kind of image people want to hang on their wall or post on their timeline. But when I closed my eyes, I saw broken flesh. Blood.

I thought something was wrong with me at first so I resettled and there it was; ...the messy sacrifice of childbirth, broken pieces of glass in the dirt, a flash of disfigured feet nailed to a cross, and a desperate wail, “Why have you abandoned me?!”

I don’t recall any Sunday School illustrations of Job scraping his already open wounds with broken shards, crying out to God in his pain, but it's right there in the middle of THE story. 

Jesus knew brokenness, he knew pain. He asked his father if there was any other way than crucifixion. Why would I think I could skip the whole suffering thing?

 I realize not everyone who betrays the one they love, hangs themselves like Judah (thank God). Some in their brokenness, deny, justify, lash out, medicate… But this could be where my faith becomes real. Where I open up- arms stretched out- and choose to submit to the pain to find new life. This is where I become fearless because you can't kill what has already died…over and over again.

To cut what has already been broken would be a waste.

HE was torn. Ripped. Flesh stretched until it gave way to his very DNA. Life spilled out unto death. Pain -no magic. Just red trickling on soft innocence, like newborn skin. Perfect. The only gift that was enough.

How did you do it? how did you endure? Just opened up your arms. stretched out on a wooden beam of …humiliation, misunderstanding, betrayal, rejection. What if no one ever knew the truth? What if no one ever knew that you were THE ONE? What if history wrote your story as just another guy? Just some kook with delusional identity. And your life became a mist. Just a sad forgotten number in stories told around a fire by a few who ‘knew’ you as ‘that one guy- the one who was…different’?

 But you chose the risk. 

Knowing that even today, the sweat giving way to blood- white knuckled- fierce resolve- breathing in determination- breathing out the pain- way of crucifixion, was the one thing you couldn't do by yourself but had to do alone…While your best friends slept and denied they even knew you.
Ha.

I see you smiling now. YOU. You fought, endured, and won. Was it worth it? When you look here in my own home, my own soul, do you know your sacrifice was worth it?

Isaiah 53:5
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his wounds we are healed.

C. S. Lewis "Shattering Our Ideas" (Grieving the death of his wife)

       "I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.  I want [Helen], not something that is like her.  A really good photograph might become in the end a snare, a horror, and an obstacle.

        Images, I suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular.  (It makes little difference whether they are pictures and statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.)  To me, however, their danger is more obvious.  Images of the Holy easily become holy images--sacrosanct.  My idea of God is not a divine idea.  It has to be shattered time after time.  He shatters it Himself.  He is the great iconoclast.   Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?   The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.  And most are 'offended' by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not."