Finding Beauty in Brokenness

1. Just because you didn't plant it doesn't make it a weed. One time when my brother and I were pulling weeds out of the gravel planter, we found a dicotyledon plant that must have sprouted only days ago. We didn't know what it was, so we let it grow. Weeks later, a sunflower bloomed in the gravel. I called it the Happy Weed. It grew where nothing else did. That's how ideas are. They might grow out of our harshest, knee-scraping memories. When I wrote about one of the few hopeful memories from the most traumatic time of my life, in a giant run-on sentence that was supposed to be about ramen, one friend said it sounded like a story. The other friend said she would read that story. Beauty sprouts in the ashes.

What's under the surface of your heart? A lot of dirt. All the failures, the times we've missed the mark, the regrets, the worries, the secrets, the quicksand of our minds. But there are seeds in that rich dirt. Someday those seeds will grow into something greater than the earth they came from, rising high above it. The smallest seed becomes the greatest tree. It doesn't start as a tree, though. It starts as a tiny umbrella of green for ants and pill bugs. If no one pulls it up, it will grow into something beautiful.

2. Healing is a creative act. I babysit a three-year-old girl. She had a butterfly-shaped crayon, but in a fit of excitement, she snapped its wing off. Almost immediately, she was sorry, but she couldn't undo the damage. So she placed the larger portion of crayon on the table, and used the broken wing to draw a new wing beside the butterfly's body. "I'm make it beautiful," she said over and over.

Maybe we can't heal the same as we were before. But we can make it beautiful. In our healing, we can do a new thing, become a new Creation.

2. Broken and ugly are not the same. Everyone is broken in a unique way, but that doesn't mean we aren't beautiful or can't create beauty. The wonder of stained glass is in the arrangement of the irregular shards. Where you see jagged edges, God sees a new color of light. Even in your brokenness, God's glory can shine through you that other may see him--and see how beautiful broken people are. You're part of an amazing picture, and don't you forget it.

Don't throw away your trauma and depression as useless or ugly. It was hard, and it might still be hard, but God has a plan in the pain, and someday this brokenness will be beautiful again.