Broken

Adjective

1. Having been fractured and no longer in one piece or in working order.

2. (of a person) having given up all hope; despairing.

Right now, you’re thinking of a time when you felt broken. You’re thinking of that person who turned their back on you. You’re thinking of the time you mourned an unimaginable loss. You’re thinking of how when you look in the mirror, you hate what you see. You’re thinking about when the loneliness was overwhelming. You imagined the circumstances that made you feel fractured and no longer in working order. You remembered how you had given up all hope and surrendered to despair. You were or still are broken.

Whether your broken was a season of your life now in the past or you’re in the middle of the storm right now, every single one of us knows what it’s like to feel broken. To experience the chronic ache that never goes away and then trying to desperately numb the pain because trying to heal it was too exhausting. Only wanting to be the person you were before everything fell apart around you. For me, that’s what my broken felt like.

I had been fooling myself for months that I was “moving on” and “happy” then one night I heard about something that broke me down. I didn’t want to think about it because the second I let it creep into my mind I could feel the overwhelming pain threating to take down all the work I had put into myself. But until I was in my room, by myself, all I could do was sit on my bed and stare at the wall. Somehow, I ended up on the floor with my knees in my chest and crying so hard I was shaking. I remember holding myself so tight as if the more I cried and held myself it would somehow make the pain go away. I felt so broken.

My whole life I have been able to solve problems on my own and I’ve had a lot of success with it. So, when I experienced heart break for the first time, I naturally tried to fix it on my own. The best people and things in my life didn’t make me feel better and it seemed like all the color and joy from my world had been muted. I desperately wanted to be back to who I was before and I fooled myself into believing I could do it on my own.

Only until I hit my knees on my bedroom floor and I cried until my sides hurt did I realize that there was only one way out of this dark hole I was in. As I held my legs in close, I prayed for God to take the pain away. I told Him I couldn’t do this anymore and that I was tired of being on a seemingly endless cycle of temporary happiness then despairing hopelessness. I prayed harder than I prayed before and I knew in that moment that the only way to have any kind of hope was to fully give God my heart and not just what I was comfortable with sharing with Him.

Since that night about two years ago, my life has been drastically changed. God sent me on a mission to find His heart and the only way I could start it was to first be lost.

“What? …first she had to be lost to know where she was going?”

Yup. Because God needed me to be so utterly desperate so I could see how much I needed Him and how He was trying to show me the answer the whole time. He knew my heart and he knew that the only way for me to understand what a complete surrender to Him looked like was for my pride to be taken away so I could see that I was not strong enough to heal myself.

“Okay…but what if I don’t have a close relationship with God? He’s not going to love me like He loves you. And how do I even feel if God loves me since I can’t see or hear him??.”

Guess what…He would leave the 99 to save just you.

“If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he will rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine that didn’t wander away! In the same way, it is not my heavenly Father’s will that even one of these little ones should perish.” Matthew 18:12-14

He’s not seeking a checklist you’ve completed to prove that you’re worthy enough to call yourself “Christian”. He’s seeking YOU. He’s seeking your heart. He wants you even if you don’t want yourself. He wants to get in that mess with you and not only help you through it but bring you out better than before. All it takes is you surrendering your heart to Him and allowing His peace and His love to overwhelm you.

“Okay sure…”all it takes” is just giving up everything and anything. That’s kind of a lot…what if I don’t want to do that because I kind of like my life and see nothing wrong with it”

That’s why it’s a choice. You must choose Him because He will never force himself upon you. That’s why until you want Him in your life, he’s quiet. When love is forced, it’s not real. He wants to be loved by you and He wants you to choose Him. Not a religion. Him.

You can choose to carry this brokenness on your own and fall when the load becomes too heavy or you can simply tell God to carry it for you. And guess what, He WANTS to. He wants more than anything for you to say

“I’m not strong enough to do this on my own. I need you. I want you. And I need you to show yourself in my life, so I can have enough faith to whole heartedly trust in you”

I’m not promising an immediate solution, but I am telling you about an eternal one that is guaranteed to heal your broken. I promise that if you seek His heart, you will find it and all the amazing peace and genuine happiness that comes with it.

There’s a reason broken is an adjective. It’s a description and not a definition.

You don’t have to stay broken. Chose Jesus even if you don’t know how and I promise He will not only heal the shattered pieces of your heart, but he will give you a completely new one without the scars of where you fell apart.