Beauty in Brokenness

Everyone has a story that can break your heart. But life can be beautiful when you can see beauty in the brokenness. Some people decide to dwell in the brokenness, while others accept their brokenness and then make their way into turning it beautiful.

For example, go and visit a hospital sometime. There may be a person in the ER, grumpy and screaming at the nurses to hurry up and fix his broken arm. And then maybe you go upstairs to the cancer ward. And there, you find a bald lady sitting up in bed, smiling within the last few hours of her life.

We all have had injuries…physical injuries, emotional injuries, mental injuries, perhaps spiritual injuries…but we don't need to live with these injuries everyday. When one has hope, one believes in the possibility that God has more for life in store.

The beauty of brokenness is that there is hope that it can result in something greater. When we are broken, we allow our hearts to be more open for God to glue them back together. And God's glue is sturdier than anything else that we rely on with our hearts.

The beauty of the family problems I had in my childhood is that I can relate well to others who are suffering from broken relationships.

The beauty of living with a rare and incurable neurological disease is that it has helped me be empathetic to others who also suffer from an illness.

The beauty of the hurt and pain that I have endured have resulted in scars on my heart, where God had glued the pieces together. These scars remind me of lessons learned, and that God can fix anything that I give to Him.

Maybe you can't see the beauty in a broken situation right now, but remember that we are like Job - who did not know or understand the ways of God. Job had everything ripped apart from his life - his children, his wealth, his health - and God didn't answer even when Job questioned why he was suffering. Despite all this, Job decides to fully trust in God even though he felt no beauty in his broken situation at all.

Maybe you are having trouble seeing beauty in your brokenness too, but just like a popular worships song says to God, "You make beautiful things out of the dust. You make beautiful things out of us."

Stephan Hoeller said, "A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl."

We are all pearls.