From Broken to Beautiful
By Jessica Brodie
Have you ever taken a sip of water when someone said something so outlandish you almost spit it out? That was me several years ago when I was having lunch with a friend and alluded to something difficult I had been through.
She looked at me, shocked. “But … you seem so put together, like you’ve never experienced anything go wrong a day in your life.”
Her words almost made me choke, and I found myself laughing. For I know, having lived my life, that I have been through a lot. Family dysfunction and emotional turmoil left their wounds. They impacted many of the selfish mistakes I made in my twenties and probably far more about who I am than I can even begin to analyze.
For a while, I kept all those wounds buttoned up inside me. I spent a long time repressing the negative. Then one day, I realized this wasn’t healthy—the wounds began to fester and spill out into the new life I’d created. So I began the deep work of healing. Of course, this is a largely internal process, something only I or those closest to me ever got to see, and even those closest to me really only got a hint.
It's this way for many of us. Our journey to health and wholeness can be a very private one, for the internal work can be easily hidden. Our spiritual work and emotional healing can be walled off from the world.
It reminds me of a massive, super-high wall protecting a castle within. All anyone ever sees on the outside is that wall. Maybe it’s a beautiful, ornate wall, or a sturdy and well-fortified wall, or maybe a wall with some interesting, complex, truly unusual feature that distracts the world from glimpsing or even wondering what lies beyond. Perhaps we assume there’s a palace, perhaps, or some magnificence that needs a wall to protect it from thieves or those who would harm it.
But what if it isn’t a palace behind that wall at all? What if it’s just a little ramshackle cottage, a place someone’s desperately trying to build up, to reinstall the foundation and put on an ironclad roof, to fortify the walls and fill the inside with love and light and all things pure and good? But it definitely isn’t ready yet, and it certainly is no palace.
For many years, that was me. I kept my wall around me. I pretended to the outside world that everything was fine, that I had it all together inside, that I was capable and valuable.
But the wall wasn’t helping after a while. While for a time the wall protected me and allowed me the privacy of my own healing and growth spiritually and emotionally, now the wall was just … there. It wasn’t helping anyone else. It was keeping people out, and perhaps worse, it was sending a message that I had always had it all together, that what they saw on the outside was how things had always been.
The truth is I didn’t trust anyone, and I was vulnerable. I blamed my inability to make lasting friendships on the fact that I moved around a lot, or that I was just very different from other people, but in reality, it was my wall keeping people out.
One day I woke up and decided that wall needed to go—because I didn’t need it anymore. I had the Lord God Almighty protecting me and the Holy Spirit living inside me. The wall was nothing but an external covering, a layer preventing other people from seeing the good work God had been doing within me.
I decided I need to start showing others the real me—and how God was transforming me. This began to reflect in my writing as I shared stories of my past and admitted selfishness and pride and other things that held me captive for so long.
I began to own all of my weaknesses, because I realized that when others could see the Lord work through, transform, and use me as his instrument, they could realize this could happen to them, too. It can happen for us all.
In 2 Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul is talking about how he’s come to embrace his “thorn in the flesh.” As he writes in 2 Corinthians 12:8-10, “Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (NIV).
Paul understood what I also had come to understand—I needed to stop spending so much energy working and healing within my wall and instead began to own my weaknesses and show them publicly. Instead of the wall, or the castle within, people could see something far better. They could see how God can take fragments of broken glass and fuse them together to create a work of art, like tiny shards of stained glass that gleam so brilliantly and gloriously when the light shines through.
God’s light shines through the cracks in our armor. In my armor. In yours. God’s light shines through shattered glass, broken people, wounded people—physically, emotionally, spiritually, every possible way. There is nothing God cannot heal or transform for his glory.
Recently, I had the blessing of attending an event for a ministry in my community called Providence Home, which is a place where men seeking transformation from addiction and other troubles can go to live and learn how to walk in the light of Christ. My husband and I are also passionate supporters of a similar place in our community called Killingsworth Home, which does the same for women in crisis who are getting their lives back on track. At the event, a man spoke about how he had been a truly lost. But, he said, Christ put him back together again. He detailed the wrongs of his past, and then stood before us, a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). In one sense, he looked like anyone else. Yet he was even more beautiful—not because of anything he wore or said, but because the light of the Lord shined through him. We could see the glory of God through his weaknesses. Becoming vulnerable made him better, not only because he allowed God to work in him, but because he let the rest of us see the amazing work that God did within him.
That is what I strive to do. And I think it is what we all should eventually begin to embrace.
God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.
Earlier this month, I published an Advent daily devotional, a short book with a story and a Bible verse for every single day of the four weeks in Advent, ending at Christmas. Called Preparing Our Hearts, it’s designed to help us draw closer to the Lord, and you’re welcome to check it out here. But when I began to feel God nudging me to write this, I was surprised when he nudged me not to use other people’s amazing stories—stories that, as a journalist, I am privileged to write about every month. No, God wanted me to use my own stories. He wanted me to use my own flaws and mistakes and lessons learned over the years and even still today.
For the truth is that when I am vulnerable, people are able to see the Jesus in me so much more clearly.
Today, if you’re struggling with shame or regret over the past, or perhaps you’ve been doing the hard work of healing, but maybe you feel shy or scared about letting others see what’s going on, I want you to pray about this. Is is possible that God is wanting you to stop hiding behind your wall and start showing others in your life what’s really going on? Is it possible he wants others to see your weakness so they can meet God though you and through your story?
One of my biggest struggles lately has been walking with my teenage daughter through her battle with mental illness, but it’s honestly been one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve ever known. And my daughter and I are not keeping silent about this. She understands at her young age something that took me so long to learn, which is that coming forward and being vulnerable about the good that God is doing in us only helps. It helps us, and it helps others.
Wherever you are today, my friends, I pray for you. And I pray that God continues to work in you and me, and in all of us.
With God, our broken shards of glass become a brilliant work of art, glorifying God’s kingdom now and forever. Amen and amen.
WANT TO HELP SPONSOR JESSICA BRODIE’S WRITING MINISTRY BY BECOMING A PATRON? CLICK HERE.
THANKS TO MY SPONSORS: MATT BRODIE, EMILY DODD, KATHLEEN PATELLA, BILLY ROBINSON, AND LANNY TURNER.
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