On Brokenness

We are broken people. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone we meet is broken.

But we are ashamed and work tirelessly to hide away our brokenness, to present to the world an image that life has not marred us. We then distract ourselves, hoping we’ll find someone or something that will at long last drown the pain.

Hiding our brokenness only makes the wound fester and grow. By ignoring it, we become even more isolated in our misery. The only way to heal the pain is to retreat to solitude and face it head on.

I know it takes great courage to face the darkness; it feels as though it could destroy you. It won’t.  In the light of Christ’s love, you will begin to see that your brokenness is a testament of your desire to love and to be loved. It is a part of your story. Your brokenness tells the world who you are, how you have loved, and what you have survived.

As Christ enters into the broken places of your heart and begins to heal the pain that is there, you will find that instead of deeper isolation, your brokenness is the very thing that will connect you with the world. Your brokenness will be a stage for the miraculous power of God.

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”

~Thomas Merton

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Author: Rebekah Durham

Rebekah Durham lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her three children.  She is a graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary and has written for numerous publications. She is an avid reader and in particular an admirer of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, and Dorothy L. Sayers (in no certain order). She'd also blindly follow Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's famous spinster sleuth) anywhere she wanted to go.

8 thoughts on “On Brokenness”

  3. Jesus is near the brokenhearted.. The sad reality is many do not believe, or do not want to hear how He can bind up their wounds.. I can not imagine how difficult life is for those who do not know the Comforter.

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  4. Reblogged this on forty-one ten and commented:

    Over the weekend we had a plumbing event-catastrophe would be a better way to describe it. I’ve almost caught up with the laundry and the carpets are now clean, but my shoulders are still sore from plunging the downstairs toilet for an hour and a half. To be honest, I’m not sure plunging the toilet that long did anything other than give me something to do in the height of crisis, but there is value in that. The best news is, by Saturday evening the water stopped leaking through the walls into the garage, and we were all reminded of an important life lesson: If you’re gonna laugh about it later, you might as well laugh about it now.

    This is all to say that things have been a little hectic around here, and I’m still working on the follow up to last Thursday’s Preacher’s Kid post. It’s coming. I promise.

    In the meantime, I thought I’d repost something from the early days of the blog (a-hem, December) for those of you who have just recently started reading along.

    I hope you find it encouraging.

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