Reconsidering Brokenness
Early in my teaching career, an academic dean said to me and my colleagues, “You are the curriculum.” My life would educate my students as much as any textbook or lesson plan. Long after those first-year college students forgot how to structure an effective introductory paragraph or how to avoid run-on sentences, they would remember what my life had taught them.
Now, as my oldest child begins middle school, with his brother and sister not far behind, I wonder what my life curriculum is teaching them. With stress rising on the crest of each new day, maybe I’ve lost sight of what really matters. Honestly? I’ve been too tangled in trying to fix all the ways my life isn’t measuring up, and I’ve stopped looking them in the eyes. I haven’t told them I’m sorry for being so wrapped up in my list of urgent things I haven’t engaged in honest confession: I’m worried and anxious and fearful that I’m getting this all wrong.
Four decades on this old ball of dirt, and I know it’s true: brokenness is what we bear. Sometimes it’s the brokenness of our own making: short-sightedness and too-short fuses; being enamored with tasks instead of people; insisting on our ways instead of helping others make a way; taking stock of deficiencies instead of the imago Dei in them. Sometimes it’s the brokenness we didn’t even ask for: a life cut short, a medical diagnosis, a broken relationship, failed finances, missed opportunities. When everything feels broken, how do you find your footing?
Sarah Clarkson urges us to reconsider all this brokenness: “A rich education must provide a way to bear frailty, to meet suffering, to tango with loss. But sometimes I think we treat suffering as if it was a specialty topic, something that only happens to some people. We don’t act as if it is integral to our experience as human beings and so we don’t include it in the way we think about education, spiritual or otherwise.”
I lived almost two full decades before I understood how broken life could be. How hard it can be to push aside the sheets, rise from my bed, and put one shaky foot in front of the other. How impossible it feels to believe that God is good in the wake of devastating realizations. Sometimes I still want to believe that pain, loss, and suffering are all anomalies to be swept under the rug, best ignored and moved on from. But Sarah pries open my guarded heart as she continues, “A well-woven narrative can be a way to journey through the brokenness, to traverse and map our sorrow, even to find its borders, rather than merely assent to it.”
Living a broken but beautifully surrendered life seems more like a nice ideal than a reality I can grasp. I’m frustrated by the broken nature of this world getting in the way of the life I want to live and ofbeing the mama, the wife, the friend, the human I want to be. The life where I wrap my people in love that feels like a smooth, well-worn quilt; where I am the person whose heart is wrapped up in what is true and good and beautiful.
As I survey the map of my life, two questions rise from the ashes, becoming my borders in these shadowlands: Do I trust God? And can I trace his heart, even when the world’s aflame? Yes, is the answer I want my life to teach. I want to gather my children in, look them in the eyes, and tell them this story: When our prayers were miscarried, we asked God to carry us. When medical diagnoses crushed our dreams, we asked God to give us new ones. That time businesses and bank accounts failed, we pleaded with God for new mercies and his provision. When job security crumbled, he whispered that we were secure in him. When secrets unfurled and ripped open old wounds, we prayed for courage to face the truth. When nothing turned out the way we really wanted, we lifted our feeble hearts to heaven to be reminded that our God writes resurrection and redemption stories.
I run my hand over the smooth, worn map of my life, and every corner bears the truth that he has always been with us, in our deepest failings and our most exhilarating joys. In each broken place, God answered our prayers with his grace. In each place, I found life again—deeper, richer, and more complex, but indelibly marked by his presence. In those places where I felt like I was falling apart, I see how he carried us. When dreams died, he offered us a new way of seeing what really mattered. In months where the bank account math hasn’t made sense, he’s provided what we needed. When we tried to base our worth on the titles we held, he reminded us that in Christ we are already completely worthy. When the band-aid was ripped off, it showed a festering wound, and he cleansed us with his love and mercy. When we wanted any story but the one we were living, he reminded us that he always writes the best stories.
In him, my life becomes a curriculum of grace. I can depend on grace. I can see what grace sees. I can inhale the Word and exhale kindness. In love, I can let the record go. When my insecurities rise, I can let Grace rise higher. Every day, I can remember that death gives way to life, and life gives way to hope. These truths hem in my soul and are the narrative to wrap around my children, a narrative I pray will teach them to bear their brokenness in beauty.
is a writer, Ann Voskamp intern, editor, and journaling instructor from South Carolina. A lover of the beach, the stars, and the lattes her husband makes, her favorite things to write about are motherhood, special needs parenting, mental health, grief, and faith. You can connect with her over at Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy, Facebook, and Instagram.
Photograph © Nik Shuliahin, used with permission
