Day Twenty-Eight

Day Twenty–Eight // March 20 // In the Broken Places

“Brokenness is God’s requirement for maximum usefulness.” – Charles Stanley –

Hope is a delicate but stalwart thing. So, too, is trust… and honor and goodness and joy. So, too, are love and faithfulness and patience and peace. It seems the best and most worthwhile endeavors of the human experience come with great risk. They come with the risk of breakage. Hearts can be broken. Hopes can be crushed. Peace can be stolen, and joy destroyed.

But there’s an amazing lesson we see in nature: that the same fires that devastate the forest make way for new growth to take root and bloom. Such is the truth of faith. Our following of Jesus Christ, our walking in lockstep with the Lord was never intended to be a vouchsafe insurance policy guaranteeing us a carefree

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life without pain. It was never meant to insulate or isolate us from the woes of the world. Indeed, just the opposite is true. If we truly follow the way of the Savior, we will certainly see trouble – others’ and our own. We will certainly follow Him into the hard places, the dark places, the scary places, the broken places. But that’s only because, in faith, we know the way out.

For it is in admitting and surrendering all our own brokenness that we ever begin to see that it’s precisely there – in our brokenness – that the Light creeps in through the cracks. Little flecks of goodness. Tiny acts of love. Like a candle in an otherwise unlit room, the light of God’s constant provision and care that can’t be snuffed out, the fact that He never leaves our side. And what we find, if we’re willing, is that the tender, wounded, broken places of our lives become the places of our own ministry.

It’s the moment when my brokenness connects with another’s brokenness: that common ground becoming holy ground as we allow the everlasting Lord to use us in ways we could never have imagined. For God does not use perfect Christians (because they don’t exist); He uses redeemed sinners – those of us with a past, those of us with regrets and doubts and struggles. He uses us and all our brokenness to build bridges to those who’ve yet to hear – to those who’ve yet to believe His mercy and forgiveness and grace.

“How beautiful are the feet of the ones who brings good news,” the Prophet Isaiah proclaimed in the midst

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of exile (Isaiah 52:7). Lost. Disparaged. On the verge of giving up, Israel would receive the glad tidings of freedom from the faithful heralds who ran their course with haste. And now, it’s our job: to use our feet, to run our race, to share the Good News of freedom and redemption. It’s ours to allow all our broken places to become holy places where Jesus’ love and atonement are made known.

WEEK SIX:

The Voice of Christ

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; worship the Lord in holy splendor. The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the Lord, over mighty waters. The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox. The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness; the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’”

– Psalm 29:2-9 –