or Peacefully Broken...? Have you ever dropped a drinking glass to have it shatter all over the floor? Typically, when we drop something we are in a hurry, and now have to clean up the mess that we’ve made…how frustrating! We either get out a broom or vacuum and begin the process of picking up the pieces of glass one by one. Some pieces are jagged and will cut us. Some are just a sliver, and if we don’t pick them up with the vacuum they will find a way to embed themselves in the bottom of our feet, and some fly clear across the room for us to discover days or weeks later. Our pastor did a sermon on how our lives correlate with broken glass. He took a big piece of glass and shattered it during his sermon…to begin explaining that sometimes our lives feel like shattered/broken pieces of glass. It was an attention getter to say the least!
If you begin to look at each broken piece a little differently, you’ll discover you welcome brokenness. What? How could anyone want to be shattered, broken, and in a life storm? As I look back on my life and my storms, I realize that the storms changed me, they transformed me, and they melted my hardened heart. When I was younger, I would get frustrated when something went terribly wrong. I would dwell on it, sometimes feel sorry for myself, and wonder why others seem to skip through life with a hop, skip, jump, and huge smile:) I realized that those are snap shots, or moments, in all our lives when things are calm and everything seems to be going the way it should be. Living your life, and how you respond to your storms can make you become bitter, resentful, and create a rock hardened heart. When you let the storms enter your “being” and take over your life, you must seek and want to change. If you find yourself numb to forgiveness (or can’t do it), you become angry, you become resentful, you become isolated, you become sad, or you just go through the motions and stop living. When people are in this place, they either continue to sink to the bottom of the pit, or they look up to see light and grab tightly onto the hand that’s pulling them out of that deep, dark place.
As you go through your life and your storms…remember that just as glass is broken, so are all of us. When we forgive someone else, that sliver of glass does not have a chance to embed in our feet and cause us future pain, when we keep a prayerful heart we gain peace but we also lose past behaviors of resentment, anger, isolation, and sadness. When I watch a loved one going through a storm, I’d like to hand them a piece of glass and say….don’t cut yourself from the sharp jagged edge! Instead, sweep it up, clean it up, and forgive to discover you are Peacefully broken instead of broken in pieces…
this too shall pass
“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Attached Song: King and Country…Shoulders—find help and comfort in all your life storms.
