Have You Failed at Gluing Yourself Back Together? UNITE Link Party

I heard it crash.  One of those mother-moments when you know you could either “get loud”, or “get lower”.

I chose “lower still”, tip toeing into the entry hall, finding one of my photos of my nieces and both my daughters shattered on the floor.

I pick up the frame, not saying a word. Hearing my seven-year-old tell my teenager, “It’s o.k. Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect.”

And yes, that’s the guilt-fighting psychology I had used on her…but who knew one day she’d be reciting it to her older sister?

We gather together, silently picking up the pieces of our family.  Then, without a word, everyone stands and goes about their business.

But weeks later, I pass that broken frame still sitting on our dining room table.  Not wanting to part with it, I had asked my husband to fix it.

But sometimes fixing broken images requires more undoing and carefully constructed gluing,before beauty can hang for all to see.

Day by day, tweezers worked diligently to take out the staples, to re-frame the wood pieces so I could resurrect this familiar frame, returning it to where it once hung.  Because white walls and empty spaces can turn the soul, wreck havoc in a way you might have never known before…before the shattering…

Still, it almost was strange how obsessive I was about fixing that old frame. I would nag, plead, stare at it for days, in hopes that somehow, someway, this frame would be made whole again.

But then, as I passed the broken pieces, the cracked up frame, the tweezers sitting trying to pull what seemed like a thousand staples out of the side of this fallen frame.

God whispered unexpectedly to me, “That is you”.

At first I didn’t get it.  But then my heart got lower and I realized the silliness of what I was doing.  The time, labor, and how all my best efforts couldn’t make this frame look whole again, like the day I found it.  For even if I could resurrect its structure, the cracks of our frames will cry out, shouting of our lack of wholeness, witnessing that we really were a mess before we found The Glue.

And yet don’t we do that to ourselves?  Don’t we sweep up the pieces of our lives, and try to pluck away our imperfections with tweezers, hoping critical eyes will rid us from what is keeping us from being made whole or fully alive?  Then, with all the precision and perfectionism we can possibly muster, we try to dust away the broken glass and work (sometimes a lifetime) in vain attempts to make us appear to the world that we were never broken?

But friends, through this silly frame, God reminds me, He reminds us, that He desires more than reconstructed brokenness. He desires more for us than super-glued, second-hand frames hanging in their dysfunction for all to see….

God doesn’t want to just fix us, He wants to replace the broken with a new hope, a new life….with new dreams and a new purpose.

And to be honest, we may never find what He has for us if we just keep sweeping up the crumbs, going around trying to fix ourselves….just for the sake of filling that blank space on the walls of our hearts.

I threw my well loved frame in the trash today.  I stopped blaming, pointing fingers, asking or demanding, or trying to be the hero of my own well-worked reconstruction.

Yes, today I want new. New robes of righteousness.  A new name.  A new title.  A new holiness that mended frames, or family images, or false presentations could never give us.

Will you join me today?  Will you join me in turning away from the noisy crash or shattered glass in our own lives?  Will you stop looking at the pieces lying around helplessly, or at any desperate attempt to want to pick them up and make ourselves whole, apart from Him?  Can we take our eyes, turning them from our brokenness, our works, our efforts, our striving….and turn them to Jesus, to His creation, to His perfection, and to His righteousness instead?

For after all, God doesn’t just glue us back together, settling for tweezing the staples of our failures and imperfections slowly and carefully from us.

He asks for us to give over to him all our junk.  Exchange our brokenness for the wholeness of His perfect and His unconditional love.

So, let’s throw our tweezers away!  Let’s lift our heads!  And let’s look to the maker of the Universe for our identity! What do you say?