broken...........

Ever feel like you are at the end of yourself and there might be nothing left?

I've had one of those times recently...... No big catastrophe, just a series of seemingly small things, that left me feeling weary and lost.

Today I came across this:

"Jesus was broken on the cross. He lived his suffering and death not as an evil to avoid at all costs, but as a mission to embrace. We too are broken. We live with broken bodies, broken hearts, broken minds or broken spirits. We suffer from broken relationships. How can we live our brokenness? Jesus invites us to embrace our brokenness as he embraced the cross and live it as part of our mission. He asks us not to reject our brokenness but accept it and put it under God's blessing. Thus our brokenness can become a gateway to new life......"

Henri Nouwen

And it made sense......

I am broken, others around me are broken - and we're all a bit lost. To live in brokenness together is a hard road to travel. But maybe the only road towards an authentic life.

If we reject our own brokenness then maybe we also reject the brokenness of Jesus - exchanging the cry 'it is finished' for 'it is fine'. We want the brokenness over - he entered into brokenness completely......

To be broken is to be lost. Lost to self sufficiency, lost to individualism, lost to independence. In the greatest paradox, to be lost is the only way to truly be 'found'. Found by love, found by hope, found by freedom. Found by Jesus, by others, by ourselves.

"you are not alone - I'm always there with you

And we'll get lost together, until the light comes pouring through.

It's when you feel like you're done, and the darkness has won.

Babe you're not lost.

And you can't bear the cross. I said Babe you're not lost"

Michael Buble

thin................

I've always been really interested by 'thin places'. The kind of places and times that Sharlande Sledge describes like this "this space, both seen and unseen, where the door between the world and the next is cracked open for a moment, and the light is not all on the other side. God shaped space. Holy".

For many years I have struggled with the fact that I expect Church to be a thin place - but for me it rarely is. Too much crowds in, and too much of me too often gets in the way. But sometimes - and yesterday, was one of those times - the heavens cracked open - and Church became the thinnest of thin places for me. 2 hours of the thinnest line between earth and heaven that opened up an unexpected array of joy, peace, struggle,pain and hope.

The most refreshing of moments - that left me thirstier than ever...........

"in a thin place there is an immediacy of experience where words of faith become words of life..." Sylvia Maddox