Musings about 2024

The grave.  

The place of the dead.  

The place of no going back.  

Many times, this last year, I’ve voiced this very thought to God.  

“I have died,” I thought. “I am not the same.”  

I would look at the terrain of my soul and not recognize myself.  

Trauma, the fires of difficulty, the deep pain of seeing your children struggle, the sorrow of letting go of people you love, the daily in-your-face weakness, a numbing grief... these were enough to cause pieces of me to die.  

Being “hard-pressed on every side,” as Paul put it, “yet not crushed.”

And now I find myself “perplexed, yet not in despair.”  

I wanted to go back for the longest time, to put pieces of me back together, to make it like it used to be, but the more I dig around in the rubble of my broken self, the more impossible it seems.  

I knew it before all of this happened, that going up close to the broken –becoming a part of brokenness- means you are broken too. 

But knowing isn’t the same as experiencing. And at times, in the experience, you forget what you knew.  

Until in the searching, He reveals it to you afresh.  

Broken, buried under the earth, like a kernel once hoping to be something, but now even hope seems dead, and all is black under that dirt.  

Perhaps it is only in being broken and shattered that you begin to understand why the broken need to be loved.

Light dawns best in the darkness. And as it arises, new understanding comes.  

Having that outer shell broken –shattered beyond repair- means the only hope I now have is in the One who was shattered and broken for me.  

The only life I can now live by is the life He lives in me –that same life that lifted His body out of the grave.  

He allowed the brokenness of this world to break Him. Can I expect different for myself when I follow Him?  

He made the pain of this world His own –can I expect myself to not feel the pain this world endures when I follow Him to the people He cares about?  

Death.  

An end. 

But also, a beginning.  

For in the Kingdom of God, resurrection follows death.  

I yearn to know what will arise out of this darkness.  

What will the tender shoot look like when it pokes its head from the earth?  

Only He knows what He has in mind.  

It’s taken me so long to realize that this is where I am, why I cannot see. I am buried under the earth, broken. And it is His life that will arise.  

For so long, I have tried to pull the shattered pieces of my soul back together again, but I cannot, nor am I meant to.  

“He,” the great Shepherd of my soul, “restores my soul,” but only to what it was meant to be –not what it used to be.  

It is faith –simple and childlike- that activates His life in me.  

But for now, as He’s nudged me to do many times now, I stay where He has me, learning like a little sheep to listen to my Father’s voice and rest my head on His heart, knowing that He does care.  

He knows the depths to which I have gone, but never have I been so far that He cannot reach me. Nor have I been so broken that He cannot live in me.  

After all, it is “the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me,” by whose life I live.  

Broken, but loved.  

Shattered, but held. 

And someday soon, these wounded and scarred hands will join His in touching more broken hearts and being the assurance that brokenness is what draws Him to you like a magnate.  

I am willing, Lord, even if it means I am broken again -like You.

 

Galatians 2:20 

John 12:24 

2 Corinthians 4:7-11 

Psalm 34:18 

Psalm 23