Beautifully Broken

I had the honor or speaking last night at a Ladies Tea with the theme “Beautifully Broken.” This is the outline for what I shared.

Tonight’s theme,“Beautifully broken,” seems a paradox, doesn’t it? I had to think harder than I’d like to admit to come up with some things you might actually want to break: A school record, a wild animal – maybe a horse, the laws of physics… But typically, when things are broken, there is a negative connotation. Broken bones? Broken mirror? Broken window? Not so beautiful. Broken promises? Broken heart? Broken spirit? Broken marriage? Broken life?

When you’re in the midst of any of those situations, they simply do not feel beautiful at the time. In fact, nothing really feels beautiful during those times. Your pain taints everything. Life loses color. It feels heavy. You find it hard to breathe. You go through the motions to survive each day. You exist in the world around you, but you’re not really able to contribute to it or even notice it sometimes. That was my situation three to four years ago. In September 2017, I miscarried a perfectly formed baby boy with no good explanation except that his heart just stopped. Within a couple of months, I was pregnant again and spent the entire pregnancy feeling alone and unwanted, without sleep or appetite because my soul was sick with worry that my husband was in an affair, which he was…with someone I thought was a close friend. I watched my children’s hearts break when their daddy left in June 2018 when I was about 8 months pregnant, then I brought home a baby girl in July to a home without a father. As if that weren’t enough, my 35 year old brother died unexpectedly early August. A couple months after that, On December 20 of that year, my divorce was final, ending 15 years of marriage. Merry Christmas (with sarcasm).

I made it through Winter of that year although I have little to no recollection of it. My sad soul was much like the trees in the woods that surrounded my house at the time. There was so much beauty in those woods and the yard. It was my favorite thing about that house, and I would spend hours working among the plants – pulling weeds, planting, pruning. Until that year. I must have been too broken to even see my surroundings as I walked past them from the driveway to the house every day…because it wasn’t until Spring after that long, hard winter in my life that I noticed the state of my plants. It was like a fog suddenly lifted and I saw that the crepe myrtles were overgrown, the weeds were choking out my lilies, everything was a mess… I had walked by those plants daily without any regard for them, then suddenly, I saw not only the plants but the state of my own soul. Like I too had shut down in the fall and been dormant through the winter, I felt myself coming back to life alongside the blooms that Spring. I saw what remained instead of what was lost. I saw how God had been merciful in withholding what I asked for and how I may have never felt truly confident or loved again had my ex-husband returned to us. I saw strength and potential. I saw that I still had purpose and life to live, and I asked God to give purpose to my pain. To make the broken into something beautiful for His glory.

A lot happened over the next year. I sold the big house that had become a burden and moved to a rental property. This ended up being more of a blessing than I could imagine at the time because a few month later, the pandemic hit, my work hours plummeted, and I would have likely been in foreclosure. Since I was out of work, I had time to write, and in April 2020, with help from a tech savvy friend that made my vision come to life, I launched RisingfromRuins.blog and shared in written form my story of God’s faithfulness during the pain of infidelity and divorce. My goal and hope was to help at least one person through my testimony. Since then, God has done exceeding abundantly more than I could ask or think, with thousands of readers as near as Glencoe and as far away as the United Kingdom. And recently, God has allowed me to speak His word into the lives of women like you.

My story is only one of many examples of God taking what Satan intended for evil and using it for good – of making broken into something beautiful. It’s what He likes to do and what He’s good at doing. There are examples throughout Scripture. Tonight, we are going to look briefly at three.

The first is in the life of King David. You remember the story of King David. God sent Samuel to Jesse and said that He would show Samuel which of Jesse’s sons was to be the next king of Israel after Saul. One by one, the older boys parade through, without God’s blessing. Samuel asks Jesse,“Are these all the sons you have?” Jesse says,“There is still the youngest tending the sheep.” David comes. God tells Samuel,“This is the one.” And we get that famous passage about how people look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.

Some time later, once David is king, we question that heart when we read the story of Bathsheba and find that David watched from the palace rooftop as Bathsheba bathed then, in his lust, sent for her. When he found out later that their union created a pregnancy, he sent her husband to the front line of war to be killed in order to hide his sin. Sounds pretty messed-up, huh? Adultery, murder. Yet God called David a man after His own heart. How can that be?

Repentance. David’s heart was broken in repentance.

Psalm 32: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long, for day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said,“I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

Psalm 51:“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place. Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity. Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.”

And God did just that. He restored David and used him mightily. Not just in those Old Testament days, but still today to minister to people like you and me who need to know that God’s calling and anointing remain despite our sin, and there is no limit to what God can do with a truly repentant heart. It was from David’s lineage that we got a Savior. And guess what? It’s from Bathsheba’s too. The baby conceived in sin did not live, but Solomon was born to David and Bathsheba and selected as the next king of Israel even though he was not the first born son. God can take a heart broken in repentance and make it beautiful for generations to come.

But what about those times when it’s not YOUR sin that’s broken you, and instead you seem the victim of just living in a world wrecked by sin? You seem to be losing at life, and none of it makes sense because you try so hard to live right and pursue God. This was the case for a man named Job.

Job 1: “In the land of Uz, there lived a man named Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.”

Job was so concerned about even potential sin that he thought,“Perhaps my children have sinned,” so he would sacrifice burnt offerings on behalf of each of them. And yet, Job lost everything. His livestock, his children, his wealth, his health. Gone suddenly. Without seeming to make any sense, and the book of Job details Job’s inner struggle with why all this happened when he had striven to live right. We ask those same questions. We want to know why. “Why did you let this happen, God?” “Why didn’t you stop this?”“Why, why, why…?”

Well, perhaps the answer is back in Job 1. “One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. The Lord said to Satan,“Where have you come from?” Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

Job endured the loss of everything – his livestock, children, wealth, and health; loss of appetite, sleepless nights, a nagging wife, bad advice from friends, heartache, pain, and hurt feelings toward God all because God had such confidence in Job that he RECOMMENDED him to Satan for testing. Doesn’t that put hard times in a new perspective? What if you’re going through the things you are because God has confidence that through your life and response to tragedy, He will be glorified? Job’s life was broken by Satan at work in the world, but not without God allowing it. And God allowed it because He saw a bigger picture that included Bonita Gomez thousands of years later, wondering desperately how did Job lose so much and still have a faith that said,“Though he slay me, yet I will trust Him”? I wanted a faith like that.

So I dug into Job and found that he felt a lot of the things I felt. He lost sleep and appetite. He wanted an audience with God so he could argue it out. His spirit was crushed, much like mine. YET in spite of all that, even when hope in this life wavered, he held onto eternal hope and declared, “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.” And that redeemer is our most perfect example of being beautifully broken.

It’s really meaningful that this is our topic heading into the holidays because if not for the world’s brokenness, we would not need a Savior. And if not for that Savior, our brokenness would have no potential for beauty.

See, the original brokenness goes back to the Garden when Eve chose disobedience, and with one juicy bite, all of eternity changed forever. Our perfect fellowship with God was broken by sin. There was a gap between God and man that we could not bridge. Throughout the Old Testament, man tried to bridge that gap with animal sacrifices that would symbolically atone for their sins. The problem was they got more into the ritual than the repentance, and their hearts remained ugly with sin. So in God’s infinite love for us, He gave His son to be the once-and-for-all atoning lamb that would replace the sacrificial system and not only take away the gap between us and God but – if we allow Him to – make our hearts right.

The prophets of the Old Testament spoke of this Savior:

Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him immanuel.”

Isaiah 9:6-7 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Isaiah 53: “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

Jesus himself at the Last Supper, before the Crucifixion, spoke of Himself as broken:“This is my body, which is broken for you…”

Because of Jesus’ body broken and poured out for us, when God looks at us, He sees the blood of His son rather than our sin. Because Jesus’ blood bridges the divide between us and God, our sin does not permanently separate us from God. We only have to come before Him broken in repentance, and He can turn that brokenness into a beautiful testimony, for His glory.

Because of Jesus’ body broken and poured out for us, when this world is heavy and hard and feels like it breaks us down, we have a Savior who has overcome it all already! A savior who heals the broken-hearted and binds our wounds. We have a God who sees a bigger picture and how our story fits into an eternal scheme and how somebody someday may be helped by our testimony. We have a God that takes what Satan intended for evil and uses it for good when we surrender it to Him. We have a God that can make our brokenness into something beautiful, for His glory.

We have a Savior that fulfills prophecy.

Isaiah 61:1-3 “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”

Because Jesus took on the ugliness of the sin of the world, we are made beautiful in Him. We become a display of His splendor.

He is the ultimate“Beautifully Broken” and the beautiful answer to life’s brokenness.