You must remember. I must remember. The reason we all need grace, from God, from others, from ourselves, is because we are all broken.
I’m just a well dressed wreck / I’m just a made up mess
Working hard trying to keep everybody impressed
All the while I’m falling apart on the inside
I look around to see / Is anyone like me?
First glance tells me I’m all alone in the sea
Then I look again a little deeper
And we’re all in the same boat
We all just need to know
We’re all broken / We’re all broken
And we all need a Savior
Broken / We’re all broken
And we all need a Savior
‘Cause we’re all broken
This is a fool’s parade / The way we masquerade
Trying to make everybody think it’s all okay
When the truth is we’re all living a story
What if we all got brave? / Enough to take away
All we’re hiding behind even just for a day
And let the scars show even a little
But I know the honesty / Will show us all to be
Broken / We’re all broken
And we all need a Savior
Broken / We’re all broken
And we all need a Savior
We don’t have to pretend about it
We don’t have to keep acting like we’re all okay
If we lift our eyes to the cross
We’ll see the reality…
(Broken, by Steven Curtis Chapman)
Whether or not I like who I am, I am who I am. – Rich Mullins
Yes, we are all perfect in Christ. Yes, we are all beautiful creations of God. Yes, we are all temples of the Holy Spirit. But this temple is a shadow, all Creation has been tainted, and “my power is made perfect in weakness.”
If we were not broken, we could not be healed by the Great Physician. If we were not weak, we would not receive a Helper. If we didn’t need, God wouldn’t things be our Jehovah Jireh, our provider.
So God made us to be dependent, to need, to be incomplete on our own. And not just incomplete without Him, but as we see in Genesis 2:18, incomplete without a fellow soul to love. Perhaps incomplete without work to do, as God was quick to give Adam the job of naming the animals. Perhaps incomplete without a place to call home, as He gave them the Garden– but incomplete all in all.
And so, incomplete we were and incomplete we are– but broken we are as well.
When death came, all things died. Not just Adam and Eve- but all of creation.
When we tried to find satisfaction and completion in a thing spoken to be unfit for our souls, all hell broke out and all became broken. Animals were killed for their pelts so our nakedness, and shame, could be covered. Man and woman were cast out of paradise, no longer free to enjoy the fruit of the trees. Man and Nature became enemies of sorts– no more did we live symbiotically, but we had to fight the soil and thorns would prick us as we tried to just get by.
And yet there was a man who died on a tree, naked, offering his blood as a covering, the enemy of men and of God, offering entrance to paradise to a broken man, wearing a crown of thorns, enduring the shame, bearing the pain– of death.
And everything was solved. Everyone who believed in him were fixed, taped up, perfected, and given a life of ease and happiness.
No, you know better.
We all know brokenness but try to cover it up with platitudes of joy or hope or faith or love, saying that all is fine, saying that we can do all things in Christ, saying, saying, saying, always talking because if we stop talking– we hear the deafening roar of silence, the groans of Creation, the aching of our souls.
Yes, we have salvation, we have hope, we have the strength of the Lord. But we have this all because, at the root of it all, we’re all broken. Yes, we have the Great Physicians, but physicians heal with time. Broken bones aren’t fixed overnight, and pain doesn’t disappear overnight. We have a Helper– not a Fixer. We have a Helper because we need help.
We are saved, but we are also in the process of being saved. We are perfect in Christ, but we are also being made perfect. We are broken, but we are also being made whole. There will come a day when we are finally whole– though we have inklings of it here and there, now and then– and on that day… I can’t even imagine or say what that day will be like. My broken soul can only hope.