Created to Break

We are fearfully and wonderfully made - so why does it feel more fearful than wonderful? 

It's the question we've been asking all week, but I keep asking a second question that I think is key to understanding all of this: what if we're not as broken as we think?

Today, I'm going to tell you what I mean by that. 

But let's start by making clear that we are broken. Sin, disease, disability, abuse, addiction, depression, anxiety, fatigue, restlessness - these are not the things that God wanted us to experience in this world. Were it not for a forbidden feast of fruit, we wouldn't even be here. So, no, this isn't the life that God meant us to have when He knit us together in our mothers' wombs, when He bent down into the dirt and breathed His very Spirit into us. This wasn't the plan.

But the best laid plans...

God has another plan for the world besides the "very good" with which it was created. It's the plan that involves Jesus, that involves grace, that involves forgiveness and mercy and redemption and the re-creation of all things just the way that God wanted them to be in the first place. 

And it involves the very real brokenness that we live in on this side of that re-creation. 

Now, if it's true - and we saw yesterday that it is - that all things break, and that all things break in a way specific to them (for example: every time I kill a camel cricket, its legs fall off. I don't know of any other creature whose legs fall off at the thigh like that when you kill them. A spider, to make a point, curls its legs inward and tucks itself into a ball. Isn't creation fascinating?)....anyway, if all things break and all things break in a way that is specific to them, then isn't is possible that the brokenness you feel is the way that God designed you to break? 

Think about that for a second. 

The brokenness you feel is the way that God designed you to break. 

God knew that you would come into this world and be exposed to the two things that make all things break: pressure and time. And He knew that with enough pressure and time, you, too, would break. And this brokenness you feel is right along a seam that God has already woven into your life so that you can come apart in just exactly this way. 

This is God's perfect less-than-perfect design for you. God knit you together so that this thread could be pulled and not completely unravel you. He wove into your life a structure that can bend without breaking. He made you so that if you stumble, you don't have to fall. Like a Weeble, you might wobble, but you've got enough left to stand on. And when you don't, you end up just leaning a bit - enough to brace yourself on the Cross. 

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I think this is it. I think this is the key to understanding the brokenness we feel and putting it into a different kind of frame. None of us likes being broken. I sure don't. None of us likes the battles that we face. But what if even our brokenness is God's grace to us? 

(More tomorrow. I know, I know - there's still an elephant in the room.)