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2007

9th July
Smells

2nd July
Smile

26th June
Waterlogged

11th June
Plans

6th June
Letters

21st May
Friends

May 9th
Stereotypes

May 1st
Broken

April 16th
Climbing hills

April 9th
The Three Trees

March 28th
Toby the SuperDog

March 19th
Mountains

March 4th
Lone Daffodil

February 26th
Working hours

February 19th
Memory

February 12th
Piercings

February 5th
Patience

January 29th
Surprise

January 22nd
Wind

January 15th
Honesty

January 8th
My Car

January 3rd
Happy New Year

Broken
1^st April 2007

 My mobile phone broke today. I can still make calls from it, but the screen is damaged and I can’t see who I’m calling. It is beyond repair and I have to wait for a replacement which should arrive at some point later this week. It has only been a few hours but already I am feeling lost without it – tragic I know, but true nonetheless. I use it all the time for arranging meetings, for keeping in touch, for pastoral care, for basic communication. I am an avid texter and would much rather converse via text than actually phoning or even emailing (although I am proud to still use proper words whilst texting instead of indecipherable abbreviations!). I feel like I’m out of the loop, like I’m missing out on lots of conversations, I’m distressed all because I am without a working mobile phone.

Unfortunately the reality is that things will break, and that at some point or other the stuff of our lives gets broken. This can not just be annoying or frustrating, like my smashed up phone, but we can find ourselves upset and hurt by the loss. I remember the time when I came closest to being hit by my mum, after I had broken her father’s clock. Granddad had not long died and in an act of pure selfishness I removed his clock from our kitchen wall to replace it with one I’d made at school (a weird pig shaped wooden monstrosity – now to be seen in the spare room at my parent’s house!). I dropped the precious clock and as it hit the floor, it broke. Understandably my mum was livid. The clock wasn’t expensive, she’d lost no money over it breaking. But not only did it tell the time, it also told of a lifetime my mum had shared with her dad. And it was now in pieces.

 Even things which don’t hold such memories or importance can upset us when they get broken. A chip in your favourite mug, a shattered glass from a set, a hole in your jeans, a scratch in your most listened to cd. They are now no longer perfect or any use to us – ok, some people buy jeans with holes in them, but if the hole is in the bottom, it’s a whole different story! So we discard these things, throw them away never to be seen again. Our landfill sites are full of broken and rejected items, no longer wanted because they can no longer do the job they were made to do.

 If I am so upset about breaking my phone, or scratching my cd, then I wonder how much more must God feel when we, his own creations, become broken? I am not talking about breakages in bones, although I’ve had a few of them too, but in the brokenness of who we are. We all start out perfect and in one piece but as we grow up things happen, life happens and we get battered, bruised and broken. We are no longer in perfect working order and by our own and anyone else’s standards we are ready for the scrap heap. But like an artist can use the broken pieces of tile to make a mosaic, a new picture, God can use the broken bits of our lives to make us into something new. He can heal our brokenness not by making us perfect, not by getting rid of the imperfections and the wreckage, but by actually using it. The stuff we want to get rid of, the parts of us that are broken and wrecked, are the very things that God will use in our healing.

 It blows my mind, not that he can do this, but that he would actually want to. That he looks at me and doesn’t give up on me, that he doesn’t think because I am broken that I am no use to him. Instead he looks at me and sees the potential to use my brokenness for his glory. In fact he loves me so much that he would ask his son to become broken for me, so that I, the imperfect one could spend eternity with my perfect God. Wow! It almost feels like a privilege to be broken and messed up because that’s when we get to feel the father’s touch as he gently puts us back together.

 So as I wait for my new, perfect phone to be delivered I will use the opportunity of being uncontactable, to spend time with my Saviour reflecting on how his brokenness heals my brokenness and thanks to that I get to look forward to a new, perfect life after I’ve finished in this broken world.