Wednesday, February 3, 2016

“Of one thing I am perfectly sure: God's story never ends with 'ashes.”

― Elisabeth Elliot, These Strange Ashes

Sometimes when I think about my life I feel like I have lived two different lives. When I look at old pictures of myself or remember old memories I sometimes do not recognize the person in those memories. I see a girl full of life and hopes and dreams and unmarred by brokenness and pain, but the truth is that pain and heartache change a person. My brain works in weird ways and I think about things that nobody else probably thinks about or picks up on, but I have a tendency to see analogies in most things in life. When I think about my life I feel like my life has always been like looking in a mirror. For the first 25 years of my life I saw a reflection of everything good and beautiful and could see the reflection of my hopes and dreams dancing in the background of that mirror. I viewed life as one in which bad things don't usually happen and they surely would not happen to me. The reflection was good and all was whole. Thirteen years ago this coming April, with no fault of my own, the mirror of my life was knocked out of my hand and cancer became a crack in my mirror. At this time the crack was noticeable, but something that was there and something we would get through without changing the image too much. Twelve years ago in March the mirror would once again be knocked out of my hand but this time being damaged and broken and pieces missing. This time as I looked through the mirror the image could never be the same. There was no where I could look without seeing the brokenness and the distortion of the image.

From day one of my brokenness I have worked hard at not being a person that waved my mirror around so everyone would know that my mirror was broken. I never wanted to justify bad behavior or a bitterness because I now had a broken mirror. The problem, though, is that I went to the other extreme, never show anyone your broken mirror. My brokenness was so personal, so intimate, and it was my sole responsibility to make sense of the broken pieces. I would hid the mirror at all costs and only in the quietness of the night would I sneak off to grieve over the brokenness. Even those close enough never saw the depths of my despair.

I have noticed that with each passing year God has been putting the mirror back together. Each year new pieces are placed and each year the image has become clearer. For most of the year the crack is barely noticeable to those who do not know it was there in the first place. You may be reading this and wondering, "What is this lady even talking about? She lost me at her life is like a mirror,". February through the first week of April are not easy months for me. One of the downsides of my memory is that I do not simply remember the details of the sights and sounds and smells, but I remember the emotions surrounding those memories as if I was still living those moments. The next few months are packed with dates that are not easy for me. I relive the sadness and after all this time I still grieve. I still grieve what was lost and never to be recovered. It is in these months that I fight the most with the demons of anger, jealousy, bitterness, and injustice. It is in these months that there are days that I just don't understand why I was chosen to walk this broken journey. I do have hope that with each passing year I am learning something new about this journey. Since last year I have been discovering that the deepest healing has come when I have the strength to reach out to the people in my life and admit that my mirror is broken and that I need help seeing the intended reflection. I have also learned the power of my testimony by simply having the courage when talking with other broken people to admit that my mirror is broken too and we can walk through the brokenness together. So I guess I end with this, what are you doing with your brokenness? The beauty is that it doesn't matter when the brokenness happened, God can still make the image clear again. The evidence of the brokenness will always be a part of your mirror, but I promise you that God can make the most shattered mirror a testimony of healing.