Brokenness

Lately I seem to be doing a study on brokenness.  Everything I read, everything I listen to brings me back to this topic - even a new song I have written.

Ten years ago I wrote a poem entitled "Only the Broken."  The gist of the poem is that only the broken can mend; only the sick can be healed; only the restless, stilled; only the empty, filled.  You get it?  I was coming out of a year of brokenness at the time.

Some of the worst years and best years of my life have been within the last thirteen years.  My life has read like a Dickens' novel:  It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. 

All of us are broken somewhere, sometime, somehow.  How do we deal with the pain of the brokenness?  Philip Yancey's motto is something like this:  Pain is good; pain is bad; pain can be redeemed. 

• Pain is good because if we eliminate pain, people will destroy themselves because pain is one of the universe's ways of warning us that something is wrong or dangerous. 
• Pain is bad because it is part of the "fall." 
• Pain can be redeemed because out of the worst of the whatevers we face, good can come. (Romans 8)

Ultimately, pain and brokenness are a given. 

Amy Carmichael tells the story of the opal in Gold Cord.

An opal is made only of desert dust, sand, and silica.

It owes its beauty and preciousness to a defect.

It is a stone with a broken heart.

It is full of minute fissures which admit air, and the air refracts the light,
creating the fire in its midst. 

Hence, its lovely hues, its flames.

 

We are very much like the opal if we humble ourselves under the hand of He who loves us most of all.  Then our brokenness can refract His light like the fire in the opal's broken heart, and our pain is redeemed.

He has made everything beautiful in His time.  (Ecclesiastes 3:11)