Five Minute Friday: Broken

A little early this week, but still, this is where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

This week: Broken

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Broken. Hah! There’s not one piece of me that’s not broken. That’s how I feel most days. Like I’m walking about in a fabulous masquerade – fooling everyone (and maybe no one) with a competent, cohesive, complete outside – when beneath the layers of all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips is nothing but parts held together by grace, an ounce and a half of prayer, and a good measure of duct tape.

After a job that nearly broke me into a million little pieces, I spent three years on a desert journey I didn’t even realize I was on until maybe halfway through. Three years of God guiding, leading, nurturing, teaching me – when I finally woke up to what was going on – it was amazing. Amazing grace and love spilling down. So much so that I almost didn’t want to leave. I was afraid to get back to real life where I would need to be whole and functioning in one piece again. Sometimes, it just seemed so much easier to be stripped bare as desert living calls for – casting all else aside and walking day by day, moment by moment with your Lord and relying on Him for every waking need.

It was easier, once I had admitted it and owned it, to be broken in His presence and abandon all to Him.

I’m so blessed that His grace abounds. And He continues to remind me that while some things change – some things can remain the same. I don’t have to lose everything that I learned to love while wandering with Him in the desert. And I don’t have to lose the brokenness – and with it – my whole-hearted reliance on Him. It is not – as I once thought – weakness, or less-than-ness, incompetence – all those things that the world tries to convince me that brokenness is.

It is simply surrender. In the most loving, complete, capable, fulfilling way that it can be. It is handing over everything that I cannot do, that I cannot be, that I cannot control to the One who can. Who sees beyond sight and moves beyond chronos in that infinite gift of kairos that we may one day experience.  In this surrender, in this brokenness, His strength is made manifest. May I remain broken for Him and in His service. Selah.

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