We generally don’t like things to be broken. Something that’s broken is useless, unfit for purpose, no longer useful, redundant, obsolete. Fit only to be thrown out.
I can remember my son, years ago, throwing a toy in a temper tantrum and the toy breaking. He was devastated. It hadn’t been his intention to break it and he was probably even more upset after the event than before it, because it was his first brush with the awful truth that Dad couldn’t fix everything. The toy remained broken. It had been loved; now it was marred.
As we grow up, we face the fact that things get broken and, more importantly, that people get broken too. Hurt comes along; illness happens; we can’t always recover easily or readily. Our bodies show the scars; there are invisible scars inside too that reflect the pain and sorrow of life.
Although our natural instinct is to fix things, some things are beyond our ability to fix. Although our natural instinct is not to break things if at all possible, we still need to learn the truth that “the LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps 34:18) and that “a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Ps 51:17)
Louie Giglio recently remarked, “Don’t try to hide your scars, they’re stories for a hurting world of wounds only Jesus can heal.” It’s true that we are broken people, but the greater truth is that God doesn’t throw out broken people. Instead:
“You restore our lives even though we don’t deserve it
And You’ve given us a love that’s not our own
You assemble all our broken, shattered pieces:
More beautiful than I had ever known” (Aaron Shust, ‘Long Live the King’)
Our brokenness is being woven into a beautiful picture by God. We may not like the process of being broken; we may feel that God is the One who is doing the breaking (rather like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord). But just as Jeremiah watched the potter make something new from something that was marred (“But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” Jer 18:4), so too we can know that our brokenness will not result in our being ‘thrown away’ by God. Instead, He will redeem every hurt, every sorrow, every tragedy and bring forth something beautiful instead.