The Plumbline

The Lord hears his people when they call to him for help. He rescues them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time. For the Lord protects the bones of the righteous; not one of them is broken! (Psalm 34:18-20) Truth, spoken in love, mends the broken heart by setting the person who bears those wounds free from their emotional bonds tying them to those wounds. I believe in trusting that modeling love in our lives will go further than any words we can speak to bind up the wounds of another. I think this is why Jesus didn't just open heaven's expanse one day, speak down the words "Come to me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest". He didn't just expect us to understand this - he needed to come down to this earth and model the release of those burdens for us. He had to model how much his love meets our

Broken:  Reduced to fragments; ruptured, torn, fractured; not functioning properly; incomplete; infringed upon or violated.   I honestly believe 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 which kind of 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 j

As time has passed, I have discovered brokenhearted people get a little bitter.  It is kind of hard to separate the two of these things from each other.  One actually feeds the other and it is kind of like no matter how hard you try to break free of one, you cannot until you really break free of both.  Bitterness just doesn't arrive on your doorstep one morning beckoning you to invite it in.  It usually comes because we have been disappointed with results of something, dreams have been shattered, or we have had our feelings tremendously put into a tailspin by someone.  Brokenhearted people invite bitterness in, not the other way around. I know this to be a fact, not because I see it in others, but because I lived it in my own life. It is so easy to drift into bitterness when our hearts have been shattered by the actions of another.  In time, we justify our bitterness because we feel we deserved better.  We sacrificed for the other person, made little adjustments in our lives to ac