I like to keep things light. Drop a sarcastic remark here, a pun there, and all is well with the world.
The thing is, though, that life is rarely light. Now you can argue that life weighs us down or that we weigh ourselves down, but I think we can all agree that we carry burdens around like boulders on our backs.
Today I read a blog post from a blogger I seriously love,
Kate Conner. She's one of my imaginary friends, who I've never met but still feel like we'd be pals if we did. In this particular post, she tells her readers that she is separated from and preparing to divorce her husband. Bombshell, right? Upon reading this, my heart absolutely bled for her. Seriously gushed. I'm not married, and I don't have kids, but I have a very vivid imagination. And I can draw my own (probably logical) conclusions about the pain in her heart. Because I don't know divorce, but I know pain.
Anyway, for some reason it reminded me of a time quite a few years back when Amy Grant announced her divorce from her husband of many years, Gary Chapman. A lot of hoopla surrounded the whole thing, and a lot of people basically wrote Amy Grant off as lost to the Christian community. See, the problem was, the details of the breakup were fuzzy and unclear and messy. But people, as people are wont to do, preferred the clear cut edges with which life rarely presents us, so they polished up the edges and decided who was at fault and who wasn't and laid out the punishments accordingly.
Except life is messy. And it's ugly. A few weeks ago, I found myself reading a lot of articles--from both Amy and Gary--about the circumstances surrounding their breakup, and the only thing that was clear is that all of the edges were blurry. And, most importantly, Amy's worth to the world is not determined by her mistakes or the brokenness of her life. The same goes for Kate, even though the situations are very different.
We are broken.
I'm a Christian. I feel like this is supposed to be accompanied by some sort of apology, because apologizing for our faith seems to be somewhat in vogue with many Christians today. But I'm not going to apologize, because the foundation of Christianity is an acknowledgement that we are broken and in need of saving. And
someone needs to say it out loud. We are broken.
But brokenness and hopelessness are two completely different things.
God can work through the most broken person. Just look at Jesus's lineage. There are some pretty unsavory characters who did some pretty nasty things. But God was working through them, in all their disastrous glory, to bring about the existence of the One who un-broke the world.
And when I read Kate Conner's blog today, I had an overwhelming urge to tell her several things, all of which are things she probably already knows, but that doesn't mean she doesn't still need to hear them. So here it is: It doesn't matter whether you've broken yourself or someone/something else has done the breaking.
God can and is going to use your life for good. That doesn't make the pain go away faster. It doesn't mean you won't feel anger. That doesn't mean you won't suffer. It only means that beautiful things can still come from the ashes.
And you might not see the beautiful consequences of this painful situation in your lifetime.
But God is working in the meantime.
