I am broken.
I don’t know if I ever truly felt broken before Leisha died.
I think perhaps in my pumping sunshine (Ren’s word for my positive outlook) way of looking at the world, I most often felt like whatever was wrong with the world God would find a way of making it right.
But since losing my child, I am very aware that God has not taken away the pain I have felt, nor would I want him too. It is part of the love relationship I had with my daughter. I miss her in my life because of my deep love for her.
Even if I will forever feel broken.
I'm flawed.
I take it back to Adam and Eve.
Here they were - the perfect couple in the perfect garden.
They had no baggage. They had no past life. They had no history that hurt them.
They were completely free of all of that.
And they still were flawed in their decision-making process.
Can we ever be not flawed in our human state?
I know I’m using these words broken & flawed interchangeably here, but I'm wondering if we are sinners, flawed, imperfect, broken, what is God speaking into this mess that helps me overcome the awareness
that I am forever broken
and fundamentally flawed.
Now tied to that is the verse from Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”
I believe that I'm a sinner. I'm wondering how those two – flawed and sinner - are the same and how they're different, but the realization is that all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory. I may need to dig into how those two are the same and how they're different.
But the reality is apart from Christ's work, his life, his death, his burial, which proved his death, his resurrection and his being seen by others, which proved his resurrection. The reality is that God raised him from the dead and in doing so God said, I receive the work that Christ has done as payment for sin.
And that sin is mine. That sin is in my flaws, my imperfection, my poor decisions, my bad judgments, my bad beliefs about myself and God. And no, I don’t believe that all of that is sin. Maybe we need to intentionally separate is what's sin and what's just bad judgment.
But God loves us so much that he knew that our way of doing life would always be flawed. And He sent his Son on our behalf anyway.
So I think I need to recognize that
yes, I am broken and I am fundamentally flawed.
However,
I'm a sinner saved by grace.
My sin was overcome by his death and resurrection.
Easter is the reminder that I was worth redeeming. That you were worth redeeming. It is the awareness that God sent his son because he loved me. He loved you.
This isn’t something I did. Now I had to receive that the work Christ did on the cross. I had to recognize that I needed a Savior. That I was a sinner and I had fallen short of the glory of God.
But I didn't do the redeeming. God did.
I am reminded of how the Japanese repair broken pottery.
Kintsugi (“golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi ,( "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
In the end, the object is worth far more than it was originally.
HMMM? Consider how that applies to my beauty and yours. The Lord’s restoration of us gives us far more precious value. AND it makes us perfectly suited to speak with other people who are also broken, hurt, stuck, imperfect and fundamentally flawed.
AND I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14)
I love the PASSION TRANSLATION of this passage.
I thank you, God, for making me so mysteriously complex!
Everything you do is marvelously breathtaking.
It simply amazes me to think about it!
How thoroughly you know me, Lord!
15 You even formed every bone in my body
when you created me in the secret place;
carefully, skillfully you shaped me from nothing to something.
16 You saw who you created me to be before I became me!
Before I’d ever seen the light of day,
the number of days you planned for me
were already recorded in your book.
17–18 Every single moment you are thinking of me!
How precious and wonderful to consider
that you cherish me constantly in your every thought!
Think about how your Creator loves you- ‘cherishes’ you in his every thought.
So in my effort to overcome my limitations of believing I’m fundamentally flawed or broken so that I can move forward in my life, I need to remember that my flaws and brokenness are places to reflect God's glory. This flawed, broken sinner has a story that reminds other flawed, broken people that God is in the business of stone rolling, resurrecting, life giving restoration.
I am perfectly imperfect to be used by my Creator, the same God who has stone rolling power in my life.
I am- You are the RIGHT one to be used by him in our fundamentally flawed and broken state. The Lord can take our dead places and bring about resurrection. The Lord is using our brokenness. Our hurt places. Our imperfections. Our flaws. Our stuck stuff.
I can expand my ability to speak to them, not because I have it all together and not because I'm going to do it perfectly, or that I'm going to have the stamina to do all of it.
I can do this because God keeps filling me and inviting me to it. He keeps bringing it to me. As long as he's doing that, I need to keep listening for it.
As I am in communion with him, he grows my capacity to share that message and allows me to be a conduit of his grace and his redemption, and his saving and stone rolling power with other broken and flawed individuals.
Communion – Capacity – Conduit
(The importance of those three words will have to be a post for another time. )