Brokenness

Last week I opened a cupboard door and a good pie plate fell out and smashed all over the tile floor. Of course it wasn’t one of the everyday pyrex ones but a specially deep and nicely fluted one. However, I’ve never been one to cry over broken crockery. As long as nobody is hurt, it’s just an object and can be replaced if necessary. 

Standing beside the car yesterday I noticed a nasty scrape above the well for the tire. It’s in the same place we just had fixed and repainted for a similar scrape, gotten from parking too close to a wall. I’m not naming names, but I didn’t do it. However, I’ve never been one to cry over a scratched car, either. I like a car to look nice, but at the end of the day it is just a vehicle to transport us from one place to another. As long as nobody is hurt, it’s just a car.

I’ve been praying for a lot of brokenness in peoples’ lives lately. Broken marriages. Broken relationships between parents and children. Broken friendships. Broken hearts. 

Broken lives. These I cry over. These I pray for.

 

It seems everywhere I look I see scrapes and scratches and even apparently total smashes in people’s lives. There are people with heavy hearts and long faces, spirits sagging into despair as they lose hope that it will ever get any better.

Jesus went into the Temple once and picked up the scroll of Isaiah and read from what we call chapter 61, identifying himself as the person described. ‘...the Lord has anointed me to ...bind up the broken-hearted...to comfort all who mourn...to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.’

That was Jesus’ mission statement. That was his purpose in coming to earth as a man. And he did it, and he still does it, every day. Sometimes miraculously in one fell swoop. Sometimes incrementally, almost unnoticeably. 

If you are reading this from a position of brokenness – if your heart is despairing and expectation of restoration lies dormant or even dead - then I pray, as Paul did for the Romans, ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.’

God is faithful, and he will do it.