The Beauty of Your Brokenness

Have you ever felt broken?

As if just one more thing was added to your load you might snap in two? As if there were missing pieces of you that could never be replaced? 

The truth is, we are all broken people. We are messy and crippled. We all come with our own unique burdens and baggage, with stories of hurt and rejection. We are wounded; we are scarred. All of us have been caught up in trauma and torment, and we have been tangled in lies and in deceit. We have fallen and we have been left bruised and battered. In one way or another, we are all broken people.

Everyone Is Broken

Unlike the next person, your hurt and pain is unique to your story. They might be fractures on your soul or pieces carved out of your heart. They might be visible scars or hidden ones. They might be a pain in your spirit or one in your body. Whatever they are, your story is unique, it is real, and it is valid.

The thing is, no person is perfect. No one is sinless…no one is flawless. Each and every one of us is broken in some way, whether shattered or cracked or fractured. 

I’ve been learning that being broken is okay, because that brokenness allows us to heal. Unless we admit to being broken, we have no need for healing. Until we admit to being exhausted and bruised, crippled and worn down, there is no room for mending and for restoration and for saving. There is no room for a saviour… a saviour like Jesus. Jesus didn’t come for the people who have it all together. He didn’t come for the sinless. In Luke 5:32, Jesus says, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” He came for the sinners. The weary. The people like you and me… the broken. 

Jesus takes broken and battered people like me and you, and He makes us beautiful. He makes us whole again.

Broken Is Not Worthless

In modern Western culture, we’re used to throwing away broken things. Anything that is no longer useful or doesn’t perform its function anymore, we throw away. If we get bored of something, we discard it without a backwards glance; in the same way, if we feel we’ve given someone too many second chances yet they still fail us, we abandon them easily. To us, if something is broken, it’s worthless. It’s meaningless and useless and no good whatsoever. 

Sometimes, we think it’s the same with ourselves. We look at ourselves and see our sin and our brokenness and our messiness. We see all of this and start believing lies about ourselves. We see that we’re broken, and because of that we believe things like that we’re no good and that we’re worthless.

Sin does something similar. It tells us that we don’t need Jesus… that we were never as broken as we thought we were… that we’ll heal over time. Our sin makes us think that we can do it by ourselves. It makes us think that we can make it through the brokenness alone.  

Jesus tells us something different. He meets us in our brokenness. He meets us when we’re exhausted and beat up and weak. Jesus meets us when we’re lying face down in the dust, unable to get up. He meets us with our grazed knees and elbows and He reaches His hand out to us and gently, ever so gently, pulls us back to our feet. He dusts us off and wipes the tears from under our eyes. And then, bit by bit He takes our brokenness and He pieces us back together, filling our cracks with little bits of gold and making us more beautiful than we ever could be without Him.

Out of the ashes of what we once were, He forms a beautiful rose.

Jesus Makes Us Beautiful

Jesus’ love has made a way for healing, for fixing our brokenness. He died and with Him He took our shame and our guilt and our pain and our brokenness. Then He came back to life. And when He did, He made a way for us to be freed from the clutches of sin and death. He set us free from our shame and our guilt and He made it possible for us to be made whole and to be made new in Him. Isaiah 53:5 puts it beautifully, ‘But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement [punishment] that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.’ There is healing in Jesus’ name. There is freedom and restoration and renewal.

When we’re in Christ, we are new creations. Our brokenness, our shame, and our guilt are all things of the past! Like it tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17, ‘the old is gone and the new is here!’ Jesus can take broken people like ourselves and make us beautiful. Sweet Rose, He can make us new and whole and complete again.

Sure, while we’re living this life we’ll still hurt. We’ll still experience great pain and great sadness and great suffering. Things will still break us; we’ll never be invincible and we’ll never be perfect. 

Despite this, we can be whole. We can be made new and healed in Jesus’ name. We can be put back together again, piece by piece.

We are broken, but in the midst of our brokenness, Jesus makes us beautiful.

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