Broken

Day 34

Days to go: 331

Miles Walked: 38

Miles to go: 962

Disclaimer:  This posting may not be suitable for children (or for grown-ups seeking mere entertainment.)

 

There’s been some bloodshed. 

Tonight, I went to my Thursday night discipleship group.  I look forward to Thursdays.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember a time when I dreaded Thursday nights.  They were messy.  They undid me – the well-constructed, posed, addictive me.

This group isn’t a church, and it isn’t affiliated with any church – although the leaders encourage us to be a part of a church body of our choosing.  It is a place where a group of broken and seeking people come together. We worship.  Then we hear a teaching about who God really is and who we really are because of Him.  

We usually break up into small groups. Confidentiality is paramount. We even sign a written agreement committing ourselves to it.  This is to provide a safe place where we can be real before God and before other believers.  Confession and cleansing take place. As we gather, we encounter Jesus in places that we have been afraid to let Him near.  

Posing and pretense are hard to maintain on Thursday nights – hence my undoing.

I’ve been attending this group for about a year and a half.  (Actually, I started to attend about 9 years ago, but the honesty I encountered there sent me running for the hills.  A year and a half ago, I timidly returned.)

Thursday nights haven’t changed much, but I have.  More precisely, encountering Jesus has changed me.  Don’t get me wrong.  Thursday nights still undo me.  It’s just that now, I am longing, even begging to be undone.

The Jesus who shows up on Thursday nights isn’t the pastel-hued cartoon I encountered in my Sunday School storybooks growing up.  That Jesus often seemed like a very important but distant relative of Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. He was pleasant, remote, and tame. 

Thursday night Jesus isn’t like that. No, this Jesus I am coming to know is extremely personal. He is a lover who beckons to me over and over again, asking me to let Him into all of me. Sometimes he woos me , similar to the way you might try to assist a wounded animal, speaking gently and coaxing me to a place of trust. But not always.

I sense a shift in our relationship. It seems He has decided it is time to dispense with the social niceties and benign small talk that I retreat to when I want to keep a safe distance.  These days, Jesus isn’t as polite and predictable and irrelevant as I sometimes wish He would be. He is a renegade, a revolutionary who will never stop pursuing until He gets what He wants – and what He wants is my whole heart and my complete restoration.

Even then, He won’t stop.

He is God and flesh and blood and sweat. He is beyond my control. He’s an untamed Savior, committed to entering my most painful and sinful cages and encountering me there. He seems so determined to set me free, and half the time I’m not even sure I know what that means.  Strike that – I’m very sure I don’t know what that means. 

But when I look to Him, I see the fiercest, most passionate, most protective love I have ever known, and I find my resistance melting.

Tonight, He encountered me in a place that few have ever visited with me.  Some very important part of me is shattered, there on the dirty floor of this dark and filthy room.  It has been this way for such a long time, I don’t remember what the pieces look like intact.  I have no memory of wholeness in this place.

I don’t often visit this room – but when I do, I desperately begin to try to put the pieces together on my own.  It is a little bit like trying to put together an infinitely large jigsaw puzzle with no picture to look at as a guide.  This puzzle is like broken glass. The more I try to put it together, the more I cut myself on the sharp edges.   

Tonight, I clearly heard Him speaking to my heart, saying “Enough, Kristen. Enough. I love you, and I won’t have this anymore.”  

He asked me to give Him the pieces.  Even as He asked, I felt my grip tighten.  The pieces I clutch most desperately are especially sharp and jagged.  They hurt me, and I bleed – but my instinct still screams at me, telling me to keep them and guard them and find a way to wholeness on my own. 

Oh, Jesus – rid me of this debilitating self-sufficiency.

Tonight, with bloody and trembling hands, I gave the pieces to Jesus.  As I placed them in his nail-scarred hands, I was reminded of the blood He shed when He took my place.

He knows brokenness so well.   He was broken for me.

I may have forgotten what wholeness in this place looks like, but He assures me that He remembers.  He has promised to put me back together. I am going to stay with Him, here in this place, until He does.

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