Broken

Remember when we were young? Remember being so full of life eagerly watching and waiting impatiently for love? We just knew in our bones what it would look like and feel like. Our future held all the promises that we could ever possibly imagine?

Life was abundant with dreams and desires. Prince Charming would bound into our hearts and fulfill all of our dreams right into realities. Our stories would consist of happily ever afters and we would have babies and mortgages and car payments and trendy summer vacations to prove it all.

Except….Do you remember when you realized it wasn’t going to be like that after all? When the prayers for a shift and a change didn’t quite get answered? When the rooted problem was not simply that of happiness or a “grass is greener” mentality….but rather, infidelity, abuse, addiction… betrayal? 

Did you wake up one day and realize that the life you thought you once had, the life that you’ve worked so hard to cultivate and create…it was all nothing more than a facade? That none of this was what you expected?

 Did he forsake the promise of “happily” and promptly ditch the “ever after”? Or maybe….Did you? Are you standing alone in a room, sitting alone in a car, walking on eggshells, walking numbly through your required prerequisites…sobbing in the midst of the unknown? Maybe you’re just begging God for just One. Clear. Word. Spoken directly  into your broken, beaten, betrayed and lonely heart. A word that will give you the courage and the truth to know what is right. Clarity.  

What do we do with  all the  brokenness that the world has to offer us, Sister? When there is nothing left to even fix. Did you wait until the kids were grown to escape the battlefield that had become your marriage? Did you watch your  life dissipate into thin air night after night of wondering why you couldn’t be enough for him anymore? Have you found yourself stuck  in the lies and pit of utter failure, of shame and disgust and can’t quite figure out what to do about it all? What now?

I want to be honest. I want to jump up and down and hold your hand and shout, “I get it! All of it!” And then buy you dinner and about twenty five good books on health and healing and Hope found in Jesus…But all that will do is basically make you think I’m a crazy person. It wont give you any help for the grief you’re living in. (well… at least that first part.)

The cold hard truth of it all? Is that as long as we live on planet earth, This ever revolving, constant spinning in our heads and our hearts is alive too.

This terrible and tragic thing called sin has crept into our beings. <Thanks a lot Eve. Am I right?> Things happen…awful things that are confusing and destructive. And the Devil is in the ever-expanding business of destroying marriages. I swear he takes real estate in relationships. Christians aren’t exempt from it either. In fact? I think we have a shiny, red target  bolted right on our backs. And just in case you think it can’t get any worse? I hate to tell you that I think we’re on the top of his hit list.

I’m not gonna sit on the other side of this screen and this document and type feel good words that my friends and I would be prone to call “fluff.” There’s no time for that in real life. I have  sat with the hurting, and I have held the crying. I have watched as the Evil one has divided and conquered marriages.  Even more than all that? I have lived the literal hell of a divorce myself. I have cried myself to sleep and lamented in rooms both alone and full as I cried out to God and wondered how all of this could possibly have happened. “It was never going to be me.”

 So you want truth? I’ll give you first-hand experience. I won’t sugarcoat the pain and the death and the anguish that resides in all of the emotions. Because if you’ve made it this far on this page…chances are that you probably have your own story worth sharing.

What I will do is sit with you right now in this moment. I will remind you of an amazing Man who will never forsake you even when others do. A Man who waits  ever-so-patiently for you while you waited for someone else. A Man who is trying to redeem you from this prison named Broken and set you free in His will for redemption.

I will tell you about my friend, Grace. That He is waiting for you to talk to Him. He is eagerly desiring you to lay down your confusion, and embarrassment, your shame and scarlet letter down at the foot of His throne. He’s already carried that cross.

You’re going to have to make a choice.

You can continue on this path of pain. The road more taken. A path of your own free will where decisions come easy and talk is always cheap. You will find acceptance in the world and man after man with empty desires and threats of love in wells that will eventually run dry. 

Or 

You can walk out of the hurting that delights in your consumption and into the face of the One who calls you Beloved.  He’s here waiting for you. When the memories of what “once was” is now a future that will never be…run to the arms of the One who will restore every piece of your broken heart.

There is a massive vulnerability that comes with opening your thoughts and fears as you take them to Jesus. But the truth is…He already knows it all. He still wants you…and He’s just gentleman enough to wait patiently on you. The door’s open. Why keep Him waiting any longer?

Won’t you let Him make beauty from your ashes? 

…”to grant to those who mourn in Zion— to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified.” Isaiah 61:3