Yet, a wedding scene is part of every divorce story.

I don’t expect anyone buys a pretty white dress with the idea that she could ever be more distant and estranged from that tuxedoed person holding her hand up there than from, perhaps, anyone else on the planet.

Such was the tenor of the dismal thoughts echoing into my bike ride to exercise class.

I don’t like to say God talks to me in any other way besides the words breathed into Scripture. I don’t have the vocabulary to express such a thing without sounding a bit irreverent or crazy, I guess. But I do believe God shepherds my thoughts with His rod and staff at times. Pulling me back from pathways going nowhere, He hooks me with a question mark (which does share a certain similarity with a Shepherd’s staff, does it not?).

With that sense of an unspoken question, He pulled my thoughts in to consider how the breaking of things is a built-in part of the making of life.

• A broken seed falls into broken ground and from that small broken thing springs roots and stalk, flower making way for kernel, kernel crushed into flour, flour mixed into dough, rising into life-giving bread.
• A seed of another kind breaks into ovum. Cells split in two and two and two, then break membrane, pierce amniotic sac and with a rush of water, and blood we get hedgehog or horse or human.
• Every dark night ends with daybreak. This, our everyday testimony that light breaks dark and not, as we fear, the other way around.

And all this breaking points to Emmanuel, the God who broke into our broken world and broke the curse with His broken body and even now breaks into the hearts of His broken people.

No part of life here, it seems—physical or spiritual—happens without breaking.

But these breakings of seed and sun and Son are breakings of God’s design.

What of the things we humans break? Covenants and vows. Families. A glass dropped on concrete. A heart.

These irreparable things aren’t designed for breaking. No fresh-blooming, blood-pumping life sprouts from the jagged edges of our human-caused breakups and breakdowns.

The only good thing we can do with man’s breakage, is pick up pieces as we’re able, and fill the cracks.

Such is the art of mosaic.

But the cracks are always there.

Looking back at the broken promises that broke my family, I can see life grown out from those cracks, but I can’t say it’s infinitely better life than the life that was broken. Not in the same way that a towering oak is infinitely better than the tiny broken acorn made to break for that very purpose. I can’t bring myself say it was right and good that the white bedecked two who were made one on a certain April Saturday in 1982, were torn in two some twenty years later.

And, looking back at the breaking that broke our first parents out of the Garden, can I say with pure untainted joy it was right and good that God’s Son was torn and broken by soldiers and sin? To call the heartbreaking days in the Garden and at the cross only good, even now, knowing from that temporary brokenness came life abundant and eternal, is a thing this broken sinner’s heart can’t do.

Broken hearts.

Broken homes.

Broken dreams.

Can the goodness of the life that sprouts upward from these shards erase the goodness of the good thing that was broken? Can it make of no matter the violence that crushed what was once alive and whole?

And yet, God, who makes a habit of bringing new life from broken things in our forests, and gardens, and the labor and delivery floors of our hospitals, brings us—clumsy as we are—into His story. He invites us to carry on in this broken story of promises broken all the way back to the first of us, knowing we are prone to stumble and break the beautiful and good things He has given.

In my bike ride thoughts, I wanted an answer to take away the pain and loss of being broken. Some way of thinking that would make it entirely okay that my grandchildren can’t even imagine the oneness of the grandparents who were broken apart before they were born. But God didn’t grant me that kind of answer.

I wanted to say no to the pain and the breaking, but he showed me how life on this earth depends on the very breaking I disdain.

I can’t say I entirely get it. I guess He’s saying that as long as there is life on this earth there will be breaking. That, without breaking, there can be no life here. So, maybe not all breaking is good, but maybe all breaking–even our own–can point us to something good.

Reflecting on this now, I remember a sort of poem birthed from the middle of my own broken-heart story. A poem good for me to remember as I write to you now.

Because, for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I wanted my picture on a book jacket and my titles on best seller lists. I wanted to inspire and comfort and help people with the words I would write. I thought it would be fun and exciting.

But one Sunday during communion, bringing my broken heart, sharing broken bread with the broken people of God, I understood what it was to put such dreams into the hands of God. It’s not about book jackets and best seller lists. It’s not fun and exciting. It’s something more.

The Parable of the Loaf

The loaf, seeing the hungry multitude, said,

Surely, I am not able to feed so many.

The Master smiled,

and His eyes held the mystery of a magical secret

and a sympathetic heart.

“It is true you cannot satisfy the people as you are…

You see,

if you truly want to feed the hungry…

you must first

be broken.”

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You, Father, are the Alpha and Omega,

the First and the Last,

the Beginning and End of all things.

You are our Source and Destiny.

And yet…

You allow this messy middle.

Within these borders, You allow Your creatures to explore,

to try and to fail,

to surrender and rebel and sing and create,

to destroy and repent and rest and recover,

to give and take and dream and love and hurt,

to age, and even to die.

And some of us believe we are the point of the story.

And some of us believe there is no point to the story.

And some of us believe,

with fresh and bright and joyous springtime belief,

that the story is Yours.

That You are the point of this glorious, blooming story.

And some of us believe,

that we are but summer sheep,

lying beside still waters, in green pastures,

in the Good Shepherd’s story.

And some of us believe,

living through invigorated, hurried days of harvest,

reaping, and gathering in, and counting up,

under crisp autumn skies,

that we are not sheep, but workers.

Days growing short, and work growing long,

in the Coming King’s story.

And some of us,

in the cold, lonely, dark, biting days of winter,

dare to believe

that death is not the end of the story.

And then, there’s this…

You,

the Beginning,

are the End of the story,

our Source and Destination,

whatever, we in the messy middle, may believe.

For we, Your creatures,

cannot

believe You

out of being

who

You

are

The post A Piece of Poetic Pondering appeared first on Jody Evans, Author.