One of my favorite songs of the past year is Lauren Daigle’s Trust in You. It brought me great comfort in a year when our family lost both of my husband’s parents, my grandfather, and a beloved pet. When your ten-year-old tells you it’s been a rough year, it kind of breaks you in ways you never knew you could be broken.
Brokenness is hard, but beautiful too. The beauty lying, of course, in the truth that it allows God’s grace to flood in and, if we allow it, to change us and bring us closer to Him.
God showed me in the past year lots of concrete ways, within this world, that humanity acknowledges the beauty in brokenness, like the Japanese art of kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold, silver, or platinum so that the imperfection becomes beautiful or the fact that scar tissue is stronger than “regular” tissue.
And God blessed me in the midst of some tragedy with long prayed for things, like my current job.
I have felt a special connection to the Psalms in this time as I have often felt like David, shouting into silence and begging God to relieve me of the pain of the current struggle while simultaneously clinging to Him. God has taken me to some places I could never have imagined both wonderful and confusing. God has let me, like Moses, see my heart’s longings but not allowed me to live in them.
I continue to shout into the silence because the struggles still seem insurmountable some days. I continue to cling because like Peter tells Jesus,
“Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68)
St Monica's Bridge 