Perfectly Broken

It's been a very long time since I've written.  It's been a season of ups and downs; steps forward and many more back; joys and sorrows.  Which is probably not so different than anyone else.

While it's not my norm to speak much about things so personal, I'm slowly realizing that my story really does matter.  It seems like honesty and transparency is what we all need to grow and heal and share our own path of redemption with someone else in the middle of their similar journey.

I found this seashell on the beach last weekend.  At first I passed it by, but something about it made me step back, take the obligatory picture, and pick it up to my bag of treasures.  It isn't a particularly beautiful shell.  In fact, it's just a broken clamshell.  But, oh, so perfectly broken.  And all at once it made me think of my family.

Here's where the truth hurts:  My family is broken.  Very broken.  We are hurt and sad and damaged and angry and some days just plain falling apart.  And I don't like it.

Looking at the shell there, lying in the sand, being tossed in the wave, I suddenly realized:  Isn't broken where we all need to be?  Isn't that broken place where we realize what it is that really matters?  Isn't it in the brokenness that God finds us on our knees with no where else to turn, solely dependent on Him?

So, in all honesty, yes, we are broken and living apart from each other and our now grown children, but we will always remain a family.  We created these humans, and they, in turn, their own little humans.  We are forever intertwined, as God intended ... He actually does make the rules!  We cannot be completely separated, no matter our living arrangements or whether we are healthy or sick or peaceful or angry.  And even in the heartbreak of what isn't, we can still share incredibly joyous moments in the what is.

"And He has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.' Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

~ 2 Corinthians 12:9-10