Sometimes our lives feel like utter devastation. Maybe not by outward appearance, but definitely on the inside. The human heart can bear more pain than imaginable. At first you think you can’t survive, and then you pray you won’t survive. But for most of us, when we face those crushing times when your heart is splayed across the mortar and the pestle of life is slowly crushing you, you somehow, miraculously survive.
Jen Hatmaker said in Of Mess and Moxie “It can be worse than you think and more crushing than you imagined, And even then. We live. This is the power of Christ in us.”
It doesn’t feel like the power of Christ. It feels like giving up, surrender, failure, or agony. It doesn’t feel powerful at all. Yet somehow, beyond all reason or comprehension, the heart continues to beat.
Ann VosKamp says in The Broken Way “What do you do if you feel too wounded, too devastated to receive? Sometimes desperation drives you through devastation. I break off a piece of the loaf. This is My body- and the crushed kernels dissolve into me, become me, The wheat seed grew into a wheat stalk that ripened and was broken and came into brokenness. If you didn’t know how bread is made, you might think it looks like complete destruction.”
The wheat seed is planted in the dark, damp , uninviting soil. Then the seed breaks open and dies. A shoot slowly emerges, then leaves, and ultimately the grain grows. Ann VosKamp’s book expertly describes the process of the breaking of the seed to create the new life and the crushing of the wheat to make the bread of communion. The brokenness is a part of the process of producing life. Without the broken seed we would have no bread, and without the broken bread we would have no life.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24
But what does that restoration process look like?
It’s slow. I have heard stories of people who instantly recovered from the drug cravings of an addition or of illnesses miraculously cured by some divine intervention. But in most cases, when your life has been utterly devastated, the restoration process is slow. Often it is so slow that you don’t even recognize it until you have been traveling down that road quite a while. It feels like you will never be okay again, but you will be. You’ll be different; you’ll bear scars; but you’ll heal in the ways necessary to be whole and happy once again.
It’s chaotic. The journey looks more like a pinball game than a road trip. You are constantly moving all over the place, back and forth, better and worse, it feels like you’re being slapped around and while there may not be literal lights and bells going off, the word seems just as chaotic as if there had been. At any moment you don’t know if you’re winning or losing or how long this is going to last. We want the road map laid out so we can travel down well marked highways, but we don’t get it. Instead we flit around envying the rest of the world driving by with such purpose and direction in their easy, peaceful lives. But I’ll let you in on a secret. Your life might feel like that pinball game, but you’re really more of a game truck. You’re moving, maybe slowly, maybe on the more deserted back roads, but the struggle in your life has you focused singularly on the inside of your pinball machine. Simultaneously, when you can finally breathe enough to glance outside yourself, you see everyone else’s game truck speeding past, but only from the outside. You don’t know what crazy things are happening inside those truck walls. Just because you feel like you aren’t making progress, doesn’t mean you’re not, and just because everyone else looks like their handling life better, doesn’t mean they are.
It’s easier in community. I almost wrote “company,” but that’s not the right word. A lot of people can be company, but they aren’t community. The words they say and the things they do are more harmful than healing. Community on the other hand is comprised of those people who come along side you and guide you on your journey. Maybe they weep with you. Maybe they offer practical support like food or rides of child care. Maybe they teach or counsel you. No single person can bear the entire weight of your burden, not even you. And no person will do it perfectly. Even your dearest friends will be thoughtless at times, and because your specific needs are unique to you, even when they do “the right” thing, it may come across as “wrong.” It’s hard to offer grace when you’re hurting, but trust me, it’s better to have community even with the hurts than to go it alone. Isolation might protect you from some things, but it’s even harder to make this long journey alone.
Jesus taught us to break bread in the fellowship of suffering. We need to both eat of the broken bread and share the broken bread with others. Right now, it might look like “complete destruction,” but thankfully, Jesus Christ specializes in restoring that which seems too broken to redeem.
