Life can change
so dramatically from Holiday season to Holiday season. One year can be filled with traditions and
laughter; and the next filled with heartbreak.
I’ve had years filled with growth, challenges, positive life events, years
I would like to forget, years I want to remain in and years that go by with nothing really noteworthy.
This past
year has been a weird and hard one for me and hasn’t really fit the mold of
previous years. Yet God’s presence in it
has been overwhelming. You would think
by the age of 33 I would have life down. Oh, the naivety of thinking one ever has life
down. I am extremely grateful for
everything in my life. I love my job,
friends, have an amazing family and there are ways that God blesses me and gives me grace that I can’t even comprehend or recognize sometimes.
Yet, my 32-33rd
year may be the year that broke Andrea, but also the year that God allowed me
to see the depths of who I am and also what I have been saved from. Myself.
It hasn’t
failed that in a moment of spiritual wrestling God pointed well known passages
out that breathed life back into me in new ways. Or I had coffee with a friend, listened to a
sermon, read a book or saw a social media post that confirmed or resolved
concepts I wrestled with. God used the
most random situations or people in my life to speak to me, reassure me and
love me; sometimes without them even knowing it.
Romans
12:3-8 is a verse I’ve known and always read as being commonly used for gifts
and the unity of the body of Christ.
Which is what it’s about, but this year it spoke to me in a new
way. “Know Yourself” the verses whispered.
3 For by
the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more
highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according
to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the
members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and
individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace
given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith;
7 if service, in our
serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his
exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with
zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
As I struggled
with hurtful actions and getting feisty over defending what I believed and offended
on behalf of God, instead he told me to, “Know Yourself.” It’s far easier to think of others with sober
judgment than to think of yourself. People
don’t like to admit when they are broken. I have tried to always be the one who holds
everything together for myself and others. But knowing myself this past year meant
recognizing how broken I was and how certain situations were continuing to
break me more as I drowned in them. It
meant realizing that my life is not actually about me and never will be; and to
be involved in Christian community meant to know myself first, to know God first.
I can tell
you the exact moment I broke but it wasn’t just that one moment. That moment was just when I finally admitted
to myself how broken I was. It was multiple
fractures, tiny ones at first that penetrated the depths of my heart and had been patchworked back together. Looking back at it now I can strongly say
that there were areas of my heart that I held onto without even realizing
it. Areas that I thought were His and that
I didn’t even know about myself.
I would like
to say that I took this growth time as a positive challenge head on. The reality is that I struggled. I wrestled.
As I dealt with health issues, friendships, caring and getting into my
own head too much; life became mentally difficult. To find the good things in life I literally wrote
down something I was grateful for every day.
I recognized all the things in life I had going for me exteriorly but
internally I was in a very difficult and claustrophobic spot.
The moment I
broke was a Wednesday. I was at work
with all my counterpart managers from around the state visiting my office for a
two-day meeting. I was called out of the
meeting to take an urgent call and on the other line was a man’s voice. It was the father of one of my team members who
informed me that she had passed away that morning. I had spoken to her the previous day by phone
and in no way was expecting this call. As
his words flowed over me, I shut the blinds to my office that overlooks my
employee area and sank to the ground. Sitting
against a cold metal cabinet in my office, devastation filled me as my soul bled
tears while I prepared to share the news with my office.
That night, I
wandered the downtown Seattle streets alone. I numbly took in the night sights of a lit-up carousel
for Christmas, the giant Macy’s star that shines through downtown, lit trees
lining the streets and store windows filled with Christmas displays. Arriving home with raw emotions I crawled into
a bathtub to eat cheesecake and turned on Lauren Daigle’s Christmas album that
I had just bought. That’s the moment I
broke. In a bubble bath, with cheesecake,
listening to Lauren Daigle’s voice.
As my bathwater
turned cold and the cheesecake sat half eaten, I stared at the ceiling……all the
fractures from the last year piled up as thoughts of mourning, insecurities,
failures of others, failures of mine, friendships and hidden areas of my heart fully
fractured and broke me. Leaving me with
a feeling of having no unwritten chapters yet to come.
But there were
unwritten chapters. Many of them. I wish I could say that it also marked an immediate
upward turn, but that would take months and intentional steps and actions to
remove myself from mentally unhealthy things for me. As unknown idols slipped
from my heart God began slowly filling and repairing it with other things. Things of Him. There’s this Japanese art form called Kintsugi
where broken pottery is repaired by filling the cracks with gold or some other
type of filler to create a beautiful piece of pottery. The finished piece is strikingly beautiful as
the cracks and fractures turn into the most beautiful element of the pottery once
the artist is finished.
God reminded
me of previously known concepts to me that I now drowned in. Concepts like Law and Grace and God’s
completed work. These were all things I believed,
things I knew and studied but now was feeling the depth, pain and joy of them
as they repaired me and rebroke me over the following months.
The Law
continued to Judge me and point out exactly how to be perfect and how much I am
not, that no one is. The Law taught me
to know myself. To know the depths of
exactly how broken I am. That no matter
the good actions I do in life I am still internally broken and could never be
perfect enough to fulfil God’s Law. The
Law points to how much Christ actually did for me.
The
completed work of Christ reminds me daily that “it is finished.” That when sin entered the world God provided
a remedy and promise even in the midst of it.
That the birth of Christ led to Peace on earth as HE is our peace in the
midst of all of the brokenness. That He
paid the price and redeemed us even as we were broken. That it is finished and there is nothing we
could do to save ourselves.
The Grace of
God continued to heal me. Grace that we
can’t earn or even deserve but is given freely as God pursues us, even into the
areas of our hearts that are hidden from ourselves. Grace that transforms, removes fear,
confronts weaknesses, exposes blindness, heals brokenness, brings salvation and
trains us. God’s free gift.
Titus 2:11-14
11 For
the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people,
12 training us to
renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright,
and godly lives in the present age, 13 waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of
the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem
us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession
who are zealous for good works.
I will
always need this grace that appeared and brought salvation. I will always need it to train me in areas of
my life that I fail. I will always need
it to fill the broken cracks and make them beautiful. I will always need it to restore my brokenness by making me new.
This last
weekend I drove home from time spent with family over Thanksgiving. With Christmas songs blaring for the upcoming
holiday season and car karaoke by myself in full swing, Pentatonix’s version of
“Hallelujah” came on. There’s a line at
the end of one of the verses that references “A cold and broken Hallelujah.”
Hallelujah is
generally used for joy and happiness and praising God. Generally, you think of it along with areas
of life that are warm and perfect, those are the areas that we praise God for.
The non-broken pottery pieces.
Thinking of
the cold and broken places in my life, of Christ’s finished work, of grace……I
slowly whispered Hallelujah.
How fitting
that these cold and broken places are the areas that God fills with Himself as
they become the most beautiful elements. Hallelujah.
