Broken Life

Warning: Christian-ese ahead.

This morning at church, just before the sermon, the thought suddenly came to me out of nowhere -- did God have to strip everything out of me so there was space for Him to fill me up with grace? Did God have to break me to get inside me? He's done that before, though not quite at the level of the past year and a half. I keep saying I want to touch people. And I know (at least cognitively) that only happens when God is in me. Is that what He was trying to do? It darn near backfired. I didn't speak to Him for over a year. I still barely speak to Him.

The sermon had nothing to do with this train of thought, but right at the end of the service, during communion, one of the interns talked about Jesus breaking the bread and saying 'This is My body, broken for you.' And he talked about what this means if we're living our lives like Christ -- it means being broken before God and the people He loves. All using some of the same words I had thought earlier. It was almost creepy.

But things snapped into focus, if only for a moment: I've been trying to figure out my life, trying to get my proverbial ducks in a row (or at least get them in the same pond), trying to be perfect so I can be loved. And suddenly there was a paradigm shift. This is what the apostle Paul meant when he said "I boast in my infirmities." We live our lives unashamedly broken. We are broken and almost proud of it. We know are loved and this is why we are okay with being broken. We as Christians tend to try so hard to be salt and light and we wonder how we can best do that and suddenly I realised this is how. By being okay with being imperfect, being comfortable in our own skin. People in general are out to fix themselves, improve themselves, get that facelift and keep up with fashion at all costs... but we're not. It doesn't drive us. This is how we are different. That's all it takes. We try so hard to force being different while being sort of the same (in a knockoff kind of way) but forcing an improvement program for our own brokenness is counter-productive.

I've broken myself for this dance dream, for the love of other people -- anybody and everybody. But have I broken myself for Jesus and the people He loves?