Broken

Photo by africa

I've been thinking a lot lately about brokenness. It's not a particularly upbeat topic, I guess, but that's where my mind has been, on tears and burnout and breaking points. This season of my life has been filled with many wonderful and amazing things, but it's also been marked with a lot of stress and hardship and wanting to rip my hair out on a fairly regular basis. I'm not sure, but I think it may be linked to planning a wedding, moving, working in an high-stress environment on a daily basis, running a half marathon and getting oral surgery in a very condensed time frame. It's just a guess. But I'm starting to learn that, unfortunately, life doesn't slow down very often, and never for very long. There's always something wrong with your car or a stressful work meeting or something you committed to knowing you didn't really have time or your cat gets sick for two solid months and you spend the equivalent of a pair of Louboutins at the vet's office (this is drawn from a personal experience, but it could happen to you!). It just never slows down, and it's always too much, so I'm starting to feel like brokenness is going to to a permanent fixture in my life, and I better start thinking about it.


The summer following my high school graduation, I participated in a discipleship program for incoming college freshman at the summer camp where I used to attend every year and where I later worked on staff. The program is competitive to get into, but it's entirely possible that if they advertised the activities more openly, it wouldn't be quite as popular. They keep it secretive on purpose, because a key component is learning obedience and service, even when the requests aren't fun. I cleaned out the inside of a dumpster, as in, I stood inside it and scrubbed. There was a lot of cleaning by hand that could have been done faster by other mechanisms, a lot of picking up trash, a lot of doing the jobs nobody else wanted to do, and then there was some running (this was before I enjoyed running), mostly in the dark. There was not sympathy, or much assistance from the staff (who were told not to be friends with us), or respite from long hours and hard work. There was drama, as there will be when you stick seven random girls together for 24 hours a day and tell them to get along. There was envy, since we were the second half group and the staff was frequently heard lamenting the loss of the first half girls. There was a lot of thinking, because we were responsible for two intensive bible studies per week and nobody wanted to risk looking like an idiot for not doing their homework.

It didn't take long for us to break under all that. I remember sobbing while cleaning out the coffeemaker. When we started the program they told us, "We want to push you to your breaking point. Because when you're broken, that's where you learn." But hearing about brokenness and experiencing it are two different things. I feel that a lot more closely now when I pray for brokenness and the ability to see my need for Jesus, and when I actually live out brokenness, exhausted and beaten down and completely, totally empty of all my own strength. But it's true, this is where the learning happens. When I'm blinded by my pride and my sense that I can do everything by myself, God doesn't have room to work. When I'm just done on every level, I finally have to admit that I'm an empty vessel, a cracked pot that can't hold water, and I've always needed help. And there is a great deal of sweetness and freedom in knowing that I need help, that I don't have to fight the world all by myself, that God calls me to rest in him. And when you come through a season of brokenness, you can see that it was worth it. The five weeks I spent cleaning, crying, studying, aching were some of the sweetest of my life, now that I look back on it. I hope that when this season is done, I will look back to find the memories are even richer and sweeter still.