Written by Rebecca Chasteen
I missed last week’s Lent reflection. It was a “snow day” here and I couldn’t manage to sit and write it out. It’s been so cold and wet here. It’s sunny today – warmer, but still damp. I feel damp and soggy in my convictions lately too. Numb from the cold from the outside in somehow.
I guess I’m probably not cut out for anywhere up North, but I probably could have told you that anyway. I’m going to go ahead and journal a little here for the day, instead of in my pen and paper journal and we’ll go from there.
Reflection:
The verse that is coming to mind to me today is this:
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.
Psalm 51:17
And this one
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:18
We try so hard not to be broken, not to show ourselves as broken. Or at least, not for too long. Not so long that we might be mistaken as depressed or messed up. We try not to inconvenience anyone with our brokenness. We try not to make it weird or uncomfortable for people who just don’t know what to do with such raw truth.
We like to be neatly broken. Just broken enough that we can share that we were hurt, we were scared, we were in the depths. But now, now we are in the light, we are healing, we are better. And really, we just want it to be over.
Or is that just me?
I know it’s not. I’ve sat in front of too many broken people to believe it’s just me. I don’t have any answers for that. For how to be broken out in the real world.
But I do have those verses. I do know that Christ was broken and I do know that God doesn’t need me to be “all better”.
That’s the thing about God, about getting close to God. The more you sink in to faith and grace and mercy and love, the more you just break – all the time.
It’s not our strength that will save us. It’s not our intelligence or our resources or our abilities of any sort. They all fall short. Everything falls short. And we fall over and over. And we can fall into the pain that is this earthly struggle or we can fall straight through that into the arms of mercy and grace. And love. We can just fall right straight through the pain and failure and brokenness right into big, unwavering, celestial love.
Or we can try to grab on to something on the way down, try to pull ourselves up, try to stay here and prove ourselves. I keep doing that, even though I hate it. I hate that, it’s so incredibly exhausting.
It is in the letting go that we are gathered up and gathered close to the heartbeat of the heavens.
We can’t bootstrap our way through this. Lord, forgive us for trying.
Let’s just lay them down. Let’s just lay those bootstraps down. The One who loves us can offer us so much more than we can ever offer ourselves or one another on our own. It’s just so insane that we try to do this, that we try to do any of this like we’re able. Like we’re able to do this. We can’t even spot heaven without the help of heaven itself, reaching towards us.
I know it’s foolish. I know I’ll still try to do it again, on my own, my memory painfully short sometimes, caught up in this place. But today, right now, I want to lay it down.
