A less complicated life, please

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he saves those whose spirits are crushed. (Psalm 34:18)

We live in a world where there are many 'broken' people. To be broken means one's life has been reduced to fragments; ruptured, torn, fractured; is not functioning properly; is somehow incomplete; or that it has been infringed upon or violated. This is exactly how each and every one of us arrives at the feet of Jesus. Somehow, whether through our own choices, or the impressions others leave in our lives, we arrive reduced to fragments, not functioning as we should, and sometimes just plain violated by another. It isn't that our lives are perfect, and we finally come to the feet of Jesus - we bring him the messiness of our lives and he welcomes them with open arms. 

One of the songs which really ministers to my spirit is the one by Casting Crowns that expresses this thought of being "Broken Together". If you haven't heard it, there is a part of the song which simply states, "Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete...could we just be broken together". If we stop for just a moment to understand the wisdom in those simple words, we might begin to view our relationship with Jesus and each other a little differently. In coming to Jesus, we are bringing broken (incomplete) lives to him - his response is to say it is "just fine" that we each come this way. In sharing "community" with other believers maybe we need to have more of this perspective - allowing others (and ourselves) to just be "broken together".

The main desire most of us have is to go back to a time when life wasn't as complicated and messed up as it gets when there are wounds, shattered dreams, missed opportunities, and all the resulting emotional scars which result from us "living life". Broken hearts yearn for repair - this is just true of all who are broken. No one wakes up one day and makes a conscious choice to be wounded, violated, left with shattered fragments of a life. There are times when we make some conscious decisions to just "walk around" in our shattered state, though. 

Whenever we reject the welcoming arms of Jesus, feeling too ashamed or too afraid to approach him with the reality of our brokenness, we are going to continue to live pretty fragmented, emotionally "damaged" lives. While we don't want to "live" in a state of brokenness, we need to recognize it sometimes takes a little while for the shattered pieces to mend - much in the same way it takes a shattered bone a while to "remodel" and become strong again. Even when the shattered bone heals, being helped along by the skilled hands of the orthopedic surgeon, that bone doesn't heal without scars. Our lives are impacted - scars form - but we don't need to be ashamed or fearful to allow those scars to be seen. Just sayin!