Putting It All Together

My little brother is both the most athletic one in our family and the clumsiest. There were many times growing up that he'd come in my room, pick up something that belonged to me, and start tossing it around - behind his back, under his legs, etc. I would tell him to stop because he would either drop it and risk breaking it or somehow hit me with it. I was right most of the time. He also broke a number of vases and figurines our mother kept around the house. He was usually good about telling her and she was often able to put the chipped pieces back together and glue them, sometimes so well that we could only see the cracks if we looked for them.

But sometimes, the vase or statue would be totally destroyed. There would be too many pieces, or some would be missing, or they couldn't be fit together just right, and so whatever it had been would be thrown away. And even the ones she fixed still had those minute cracks, no matter how well she repaired them.

A lot of people have used, or at least heard, the expression "picking up the pieces of my broken heart." They glue it back together, one little piece at a time, trying to make it stronger than it was before, trying to hide the cracks from other people, only to watch helplessly as it gets shattered again. The only way most of them find around that is to take their heart away from everyone, lock it in a safe, and let no one in.

My father was not, by any metric, a good father when I was growing up. There are worse fathers, I know, but the things he did to our family still affect us. And yet God has been working on me to forgive him. When I felt that, I started complaining to God, listing all the various things he had done, trying to justify my hatred of him. Then God shut me up like only he can, "Did anything he did break your life beyond My ability to fix it?"

I can't answer yes to that, even though that's what my heart has been claiming all these years. Focusing on the wreckage of my shattered youth, I cried that it was broken and no one could fix it, and so I had a right to hate the one who had done it.

But Jesus was sent to fix the broken. The sin in our lives that kept us from knowing God - paid for. The eternal death that was supposed to be ours - no more. The pain and suffering we all go through is still there, but He is our strength that gives us peace and guides us through them.

And then our hearts - He quite literally was dying to put them back together for us.

When I hear people wondering why God won't heal them or their hearts, I often think of a quote I once heard, "God can put your heart back together, but He must have all the pieces." What we so often do is complain that it's broken, but then piece it together ourselves or hide it away. When we do the former, there will be cracks in it, and whatever glue we use won't be strong enough to make it as it was before. When we do the latter, we lose all the good that we are meant to enjoy in an effort to avoid the bad.

God, though, can actually put all the pieces back where they were and meld them together again, making the heart brand new and strong. It is your choice: you can have a heart that beats for Him, or pieces of your broken heart that you try to glue back together or hide for the rest of your life.