Brokenness

Oooooh...

I went to one of my favourite sites - Max Lucado's. The Daily Audio (a 1-2 minute spoken message from Max) was simply titled 'Brokenness'. Now if you've read the title of this blog, not to mention my profile, you'll understand that this is a favourite theme of mine. So I didn't hesitate to right-click on the link, copy the location and open it in Winamp. Wow... a short, but poignant message. This is the bit that really stood out to me -

"Look at society! Broken hearts, broken lives, broken dreams. These people need to be put back together, and God can do just that, and he does so - through the church!"

Listen to the whole message using this link.

It just occurred to me that one of my favourite bible verses of all time is also along these lines. It says -

Every morning I lay out the pieces of my life on your altar and watch for fire to descend.
Psalm 5:3b (MSG)

Wow. Why is it a favourite? Because the imagery, to me, speaks of taking all the broken bits of my life - the relationships I dropped and cracked, the opportunities crumbled in my wake, the collapsed wall I had built around part of my heart, the hurt I walked straight into which left me crippled - taking them all and putting them on God's altar. And that's not all. It's not just that I can take them all to God and leave them with him. His fire descending invokes the idea that he can transform what I give him. He can turn worthless broken pieces of pottery and turn them into something beautiful. Like a mosaic - the broken bits are still there, they're still broken, but if they'd never been broken they never could have formed a piece of artwork more beautiful than the original object.

So... it's great that I can wax theological and wave pretty concepts around... but what am I doing about it? First I need to tell you a couple of seemingly-unrelated, but very pertinent facts:

First, one of my great struggles in life is to trust other christians. Church is supposed to be a place where it's OK to be broken. This I believe. But it's hard to be vulnerable and open to imperfect people. Nevertheless, I've been slowly but surely opening my heart to people at church.

Second, hubby and I have been doing short bible studies together at rather random times. We look at a passage, extract a concept which particularly spoke to each of us, and work out what we can do in the next day or week to put the concept into practice in our lives. It might be an individual challenge, it might be something we do together. The last passage we looked at was -

Is there any encouragement from belonging to Christ? Any comfort from his love? Any fellowship together in the Spirit? Are your hearts tender and sympathetic? Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working together with one heart and purpose.

Don't be selfish; don't live to make a good impression on others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself. Don't think only about your own affairs, but be interested in others, too, and what they are doing.
Phillippians 2:1-4

The challenge that we came up with was to invite someone from church over every week for dinner. The point being to help increase fellowship in our church, get to know people better, and show interest in people's lives. I said to someone recently that people don't 'drop out' of our church - at least to my knowledge. Everyone is known, people are noticed, absences are noted and prayed over, often followed up. Not in a judgmental way - but out of love and concern. Hubby and I aren't currently doing much to aid this process, so hopefully we can, in making this step, open up our hearts and lives to our church. I see this as a first step, not as a destination... in opening our home once a week I suspect we'll soon open our home in a bigger way. How? Oh, I don't know. God doesn't tell me these things!