Hanging on to the Broken Mirror

Confession:  When I started this blog a little over a year ago, I was not entirely sure I would stick with it.  I was almost sure I would be criticized, judged, and defeated.  And while I am sure my critics are out there, because we all have them, I am beyond humbled by those of you who have reached out to me in response to a message that touched you.  I can tell you that those messages that pierce you right in the "feels", those are are not from me, but from Him.  I recently spent an afternoon going back and reviewing where I started and where I was finding myself.  And I cried at the things God used me to say.  The Letter To My 30-Year Old Self had me boo-hoo-ing at the healing and the scars that mark the journey ten years later.

And here is one of the first things I wrote in that initial blog, that first step into transparency, that embracement of vulnerability, that "let me invite you into my very imperfect world":

I feel called to share my Faith in a BIG way, but am becoming more aware each day that the SMALL ways are when He works most effectively.  If I can give one half of one ounce of HOPE to one person, then my day can be check-marked a success, and if not, I will mark the box that says "try again tomorrow".  I feel called to be completely ordinary, completely broken, and completely available to share how perfectly imperfect our brief lives are.

I have set a goal for myself, outside of this blog, to write one thousand words a day for thirty days.  Not including weekends because...Yeah!  Weekends!  Besides the fact that we are usually at baseball and if you could see the variety of activities that vomited on my June calendar this past week, well.  Yeah!  Weekends.  I have had some blips hit my radar and missed some week days, but the goal is to have a goal, do my very best to make it a priority, and have a giant cup of coffee and a whole lot of grace if the day goes otherwise.

I have a piece of broken mirror that I use everyday to check the back of my hair in the larger bathroom mirror.  This piece is the larger fragment of a small square travel mirror which I recently dropped.  But here is the deal, before I had this shard, I had been using another shard for almost five years.  It was a smooth triangular piece that came from a similar mirror that busted in conjunction with our lives being shattered by shady business deals, hail storms, break-ins, and bankruptcy.  We were having so much "bad luck" that that broken mirror had nothing on me!  So I kept it as a daily reminder of what we were going and had gone through, and how far we had come.  And just when I decided to get rid of it and let the past be the past, two days later I break the new mirror.

I realized that I need that little piece of brokenness to start my day each morning.  A small reflection to keep my humble and remind me that 7-years is 7-years:  bad luck, good luck, blessings, broken dreams, new paths, old dreams, new blessings, shorter hair, and a little larger waist size.  A reminder that beautiful things sometimes get broken in a thousand different ways, but that doesn't make them less useful, less important, less loved.

As I wrote this week of an event in my past, it drew out some crocodile tears.  I had a busy week last week and did not have a chance to finish a personal bible study I was almost at the end of.  I would like to draw attention to God's timing here because my True Spirituality book by Chip Ingram, in Chapter 22:  Will You Let Christ Heal You?, tells me that Forgiveness is a three-stage process.  My emotional surface was questioning this memory and debating if I had indeed forgiven.

Stage 1 - to forgive - is a choice; an act of the will.  You don't need to feel like forgiving someone to do it.  You need to choose to release any desire for retribution to God and treat them with mercy.

Stage 2 - forgiving - is a process whereby your choice to forgive begins over time to align with your emotions.  This process can take months or even years.  The key at this stage is prayer.  Prayer for the ability to let the bitterness and denial go...

Stage 3 - forgiven - is an alignment of the Spirit of God, your choice to obey God in forgiving, combined with the emotional experience of feeling genuine joy when blessing that person's life.  It is not an easy process!

My writing is the process I use to begin the work of letting the past go.  And as I read and reread these steps I come to the the conclusion that it is forgiven...but the brokenness remains.  Then I realized that just like my broken mirror reminder and the story that Paul shares with the Corinthians, I have a thorn in my side.  I have a weakness in this vulnerability that allows me to lean fully on the grace of Jesus.

2 Corinthians 12:7  So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.

The other night I placed a notepad and pencil by my bed because I am pretty brilliant while I overthink at 2:00 am or in between sleeps and the snooze button.  The other day God said to my heart, "the world looks broken because we fail to be".  All the brokenness that we are trying to hide, the cracks in the glass, the kinks in the armor...those are being projected onto our world.  If I can just hide my flaws and failings, then I can project it onto something else and take the attention away from what is lying just skin deep.  The world is reflection of what we are.  And my friends, whether you like to admit it or not, you are broken.

We will never be whole in the way we were before we hit the ground and slivers of us were swept up and sifted through.  We have to embrace the fact that we are looking in one mirror to see what the other mirrors sees.  It is important to share our shards, our thorns, our stories.  In doing so, we are saying I will be the reflection you need to get up and keep going, I will be the rose to your thorn, I will be the chapter in the book that yells "plot twist!" and walks arm and arm with you into a world that yes, is broken, but is also a million plus different pieces of beautiful...

If you take nothing else from this today, please break yourself down for 3 minutes and 16 seconds to not just hear, but listen, not just watch, but absorb the words from my girl Francesca, "If We're Honest"...

Praying surrender, courage, acceptance, grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love over my readers today.  May you feel the brokenness that Christ endured pierce your heart in honesty.  Amen.