or broken in pieces...?  The loss of someone we love dearly, going through a divorce, the loss of our home in a fire, the loss of a job, navigating changes in life that we can’t control to barely scratch broken in our lives. Have you ever dropped a drinking glass to have it shatter all over the floor?   We get out a 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. A few pieces of glass may fly clear across the room for us to discover days, weeks, months, years later as a reminder of our broken lives.  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.  

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 and a jump.  I realized that those are snap shots in all our lives when things are calm and everything seems to be going the way we would like it to go.  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 embrace our broken pieces and begin to heal, that sliver of glass does not have a chance to embed in our feet and cause us future pain. Share your grief with others, open your heart to heal, and turn something in your life from broken in pieces….to peacefully broken.

this too shall pass