Carley

I met Carley back in late May of this year. It was a chance meeting, and an even chance-r conversation. She was one of the physical therapists filling in on my unit in the hospital, picking up a weekend shift as a very part-time employee. I overheard her speaking with one of the patients near my desk about vertigo and dizziness and balance. 

When she came out, I asked, "Do you do some vestibular therapy, too?" 

I haven't really had many conversations with our part-time therapists. Almost none, actually. And for the most part, I tend to keep my personal medical needs out of my work relationships. Yes, I work in medicine; no, that doesn't mean I get to cash in for free. (Most of my coworkers know the battles I'm fighting, but I'm not soliciting them for help.) 

I wasn't really soliciting Carley, either. I had done vestibular therapy a few years prior, and it wasn't the best experience for me. That is, it was the one round of physical therapy that I'd had that hadn't seemed to have done anything. But I was trying to establish connections with my coworkers, to be more diligent about reaching across departments (something that had come up in a recent conversation with my manager), and I thought...here's something we can talk about. 

I told her I'd done some vestibular therapy myself. It hadn't really worked for me, but I understood it as a very neat specialty, and it was cool that she was into that. 

As it turns out, not only was she into that; it was her job. Like, her regular job. She worked at a specialty neurological/vestibular therapy center, so this was the kind of patient she saw all day, every day. She was more than happy to give me her contact info and tell me to try it again, to come see her, to check out the advanced stuff they had there that I might not have had in my previous experience. 

I kept that post-it note on my desk for months. 

But I never made it to see Carley. A week or two later, I met the surgeon who was supposed to fix my vertigo; a few weeks after that, had surgery; a few weeks after that, was doing amazing and was learning to drive again. I always appreciated that she had reached back out to me, but things were finally seeming to turn and it looked like I wasn't going to need her. 

Until things turned again and I ended up more crippled than I'd ever been by my vestibular issues. 

By that point, my hospital had hired Carley. She had begun seeing patients at our outpatient center. And when I followed up with my surgeon and he suggested more therapy to help me get back on track, I mentioned that we'd actually just hired one of the therapists that used to work closely with his patients. 

"You have Carley!" he exclaimed. "You've got to go see Carley." 

So I went to see Carley, who I had not seen, not even once, since that one shift when I had tried to be better about reaching across departments, and Carley remembered everything about our one conversation. Not only that, but she brought her amazingly specialized set of skills to bear on my situation, and now, we're working together toward all the things that seemed like only a dream just a few months ago. 

It reminds me that no encounter in our world is random. God puts the right persons in your life at the right time, and you may not even know it. 

And not only that, but He puts you in the lives of others at just the right time. Have you ever stopped to consider that? 

Who would have thought that one chance encounter on one weekend shift with one new person I had never met would turn into the hope that I so desperately needed just a short breath later? 

I don't know if Carley knows that she is that one new person for me in this season. But then, I don't know who I am that one new person for in this season, either. Whose life has God put me into for such a moment as this? 

Because of one seemingly-random conversation before I even knew what was happening, I am living with eyes wide open to that possibility. For perhaps we are all somebody's Esther.  

Embrace It

Getting honest about what's broken in your life and what it's taken from you...and threatening to take...is the first step toward healing, but to be honest, there's another very important step that is closely related to that. 

You have to embrace it. 

You have to embrace what's broken in your life. You have to let it be broken. You have to live to the best of your ability within your limitations and let yourself feel what it's like to have those restrictions around you. 

That seems defeatist. That seems silly, perhaps. It definitely runs counter to the "I'm fine" culture that tells us to put on a brave face, wipe our tears, live our lives, and not let anything be any less than everything we want out of it. 

But here's the thing: most of us can't swim upstream. Not for very long. We're throwing our energies away and leaving ourselves with nothing left to fight with, and we're losing not just our battles, but the war. 

And I think there's a certain value in being able to simply say, this is what I can do right now. This is what I'm capable of and this is what I'm not capable of. There's value in learning to say no to the things that are beyond your capabilities. There's value in learning what it's like to be a person of limited abilities. 

That value is (at least) two-fold. First, it gives you an appreciation for the life that you have. You learn to like things more. You learn to savor them, to enjoy them. 

Second, it tells you what you want. It helps you figure out what's important to you. It's like figuring out all the empty places in front of you and getting to decide what you want to fill them up with...if anything. 

Maybe you discover that your brokenness creates spaces in your life that you really like. That you suddenly have margin for the first time, margin that you would never have recognized if you had still been using all of that space to try to fight. To try to get back what used to be there. 

Maybe, as it turns out, you like having that space and it becomes precious, if not sacred, to you. Suddenly, it becomes part of the shape of your new life and you find that you're willing to do a lot of things to protect it. Like...maybe not even want to get back some of what you lost. Maybe you're okay simply losing it. 

You don't know what your life is or what it can be or what it feels like unless you're truly living it, and you aren't truly living it unless you embrace it. All of it. The good and the bad. The successes and the failures. The triumphs and the troubles. The well places and the broken places. 

Oh, we should talk about the wells. (Maybe later...) 

The point is...get honest about your brokenness and then, embrace it. It's the best way to figure out where your life is really at and where you want it to go from here. 

Only then can you begin the true work of real healing. 

With the help of the Lord, of course. 

Getting Honest

We are good at compensating for our brokenness, but often, we're doing more damage to ourselves than we understand, even when our compensations are subconscious.  

We are also good at pretending. 

We are good at pretending that we're not ask broken as we are. We are good at pretending that we understand what's happening to us, that we've planned for every contingency, that we're "fine." We're good at pretending that we're making it. 

But pretending isn't helping us, either. 

What pretending does is it puts one more thing on your plate. One more draw on your energy. One more task on your weary soul. It requires more than you really have to give, and one of the reasons you're not getting better is because you're using all of your energies to cover yourself up, so you don't have anything left to tackle the actual problem. You don't have anything left to fight the actual fight. Your tank is perpetually empty because you're pouring it out on the grass that everyone can see, trying to make it greener, all the while really wishing you were growing flowers just a few feet away. 

We've all been there. We've all done it. Some of us are doing it right now. We're broken, and in response to our brokenness, we're breaking ourselves down. 

We don't start healing until we start getting honest. Until we acknowledge our limitations. Until we learn to say that right now, we just can't. 

Can't do that. Can't manage that. Can't add that to our schedule. Can't keep pushing through. Can't do this on our own. Can't overcome. Can't whatever.

We have to be real about the toll that our brokenness is taking on our lives and be real about the ways that it is shaping whatever season we're in. 

Only then can we be honest about the problem. Only then can we be real about what's going on.

Only then can we start to heal. 

I believe you have to let yourself feel the losses in your life. You have to let yourself feel the limitations. You have to let yourself be burdened by your brokenness so that you understand exactly what kind of box it's putting you in, how it is restricting you, how it's keeping you from what you want to do, all the things it's already taken away and the things it's threatening to add to its list. You have to let yourself feel the full weight of what it's like to be broken so that you know what you're facing. 

And when you do, you start to see how your life is built. You start to see how you want to build it. You start to understand the pieces that are important to you, the ones you want to get back, the ones that are the foundation for other things you want to build and to have and to grow in your life. 

You can't start healing until you know these things. Until you can name them. If you can't name them, how do you know what healing even looks like? How will you know when you get there? 

Healing starts when you're honest about what you're missing...and what it means to you. 

The Path Forward

There is a brokenness where you can step in early and kind of put the pieces back together before they fall completely apart, and there is a brokenness that you have to let crumble before you can even find a place to begin, but the one thing that they both have in common is that there is no path forward other than through it. 

We spend our lives trying to compensate for our brokenness. Sometimes, we do this subconsciously - we aren't even aware of the ways in which we are compensating; we just do it. Sometimes, we know exactly what we're doing. 

For example, if you have a weak leg, you'll automatically be shifting your body weight toward your stronger leg, without even realizing it. Or maybe you know you have a weakness for certain social situations, so you set up a rescue phone call with a friend before you attend an event - so you have an excuse to leave when you need it. 

The problem is that these compensations do not actually fix our brokenness. They do not solve our problems. They make us more functional in the world, for a short while, but eventually, they create greater weaknesses and more problems. 

Shifting your weight may work for awhile...until your good knee and hip and ankle start to ache. Until your back starts to curve. Until your shoulders start to slope. And all of a sudden, years have passed, and you're entirely bent out of shape and you didn't even know it. 

Having a friend give you a rescue call works for awhile. Until you need to stay longer. Until your friend is busy. Until your phone battery dies. And now, you're stuck, with no skills for navigating the social situation, no clue what to do except beg for someone - anyone - to rescue you, and now, you're vulnerable to take any ol' way out of the situation because you don't know how to fend for yourself. 

Our compensations don't make us stronger; they make us weaker. 

The only real way to overcome brokenness is through it. 

It's through putting in the work. It's through being honest with ourselves. It's through recognizing our compensations and noticing the places where we're prone to cheat - not just to cheat our weaknesses, but to ultimately cheat ourselves. 

It's through intentionally working our weak places, building them up, finding true strength. Not ways to work around it, but ways to use it to our advantage. It's through being honest with others and asking for accountability. It's about confessing our weakness, and our weak moments, apologizing when truly necessary (not apologizing when it's not - we owe no one an apology for being broken), accepting temporary limitations, trusting in the God who makes all things new, and becoming new. 

Fruit doesn't form on a vine that tries to grow beside itself. It grows on the vine that keeps poking through, millimeter by millimeter by millimeter, in a single direction and slowly becoming bigger, stronger, more robust, and ready to bear fruit. 

That's how we get through brokenness. Millimeter by millimeter by millimeter, slowly becoming, growing through, until we're bigger, stronger, more robust and ready to bear fruit. Fruit that our once-weak knees and tired hands (Hebrews) are strong enough to support.  

Broken Things

This world is falling apart. We know that. 

We see it every day in the headlines, in our feeds, in our mirrors. We feel it in our hearts. Science tells us that things are always devolving into chaos unless some force is acting on them to keep them moving in a different direction. 

Those of us who have faith believe that our falling-apart world is also slowly being made new again, but it can be hard to reconcile these ideas. Especially when they impact our own hearts. 

I've been thinking about broken things lately...for obvious reasons and for some that are not so obvious. And one of the things that I'm coming to understand is that how we handle broken things depends on what's broken and how broken it is. 

There are some things that can break a little bit and you can put them back together right then and there before the break gets any worse. You can save these things fairly early on and get good life out of them for a good long while afterward, just by stepping in when you see the fracture starting to happen. At the same time, if you let these things go for too long, you'd lose them entirely. They wouldn't be able to be put back together. So you have to get to them early...or forsake them forever. 

On the other hand, there are things that have to completely fall apart before you can even start to mend them. Things that have to reach rock bottom, that have to become a pile of rubble. Things that have to have almost nothing left to them at all before they can be made new. If you try to step in too early, these things are too fragile at their fractures, and you end up breaking them worse than they were when you got them. These are the things that we look at and decide, "I will do something about that when it falls completely off." Because you just know it will be easiest - and strongest - at that point if you put it back together in that way. 

The same is true for us. 

There are times in our lives when we can be put back together fairly early on, seal the cracks, tighten up the loose bits, and get a good long life out of it. There are times when our cracks start to show and one good hug would put them all back together for us, one act of love, one moment of true connection. At the same time, in these situations, if you let us go too far, there's no getting us back. We're broken forever. (This is, in part and very roughly, how trauma breaks us...sometimes.) 

There are other times when you have to just let us fall completely apart, lose everything, hit rock bottom. We have to understand how helpless we are before we can accept the help that will put us back together. And sometimes, just breaking completely down like that lets all the crud and the junk fall through the breaks and into the sewers where it belongs. Then, we're left with good pieces to pick back up and put back together. (This is, in part and very roughly, how addiction breaks us...sometimes.) 

None of us wants to be broken, but this world is falling apart. Us included. And one of the best things we can do for ourselves and others is to understand how we're breaking so that we know what it has to look like to put us back together again. 

And one thing better than that is to have faith that our falling-apart world is also slowly being made new again...including us. 

Even when it's hard to understand how that's even possible.