Brokenness

A church I used to attend had a women’s Bible study on Thursday nights.  At the time, they were doing Stormie Omartian’s Lord, I Want to be Whole.  Here is the back cover description of the book:

Omartian, a survivor of child abuse, brings a powerful message of hope and healing to all who seek deliverance from depression and spiritual oppression. She shows you how prayer and encouragement from Scripture can help you come to terms with the past; how to maintain emotional wholeness; and how to receive God’s gifts.

I remember coming home from the second or third week and Gregg asking me if I liked it.  I shrugged and said, “Eh.  I’m not broken.  I don’t understand this study or this focus or why people can’t just move on.”

Now, before you think that I come from a “broken free” life, you should probably know a few things:

1. I have been sexually assaulted.
2. I have been married to an addict…
3. …who had an extramarital affair with my best friend.
4. I have been pregnant 8 times and I have 3 children.
5. I have been that wife whose husband was in a war zone on the first anniversary of 9-11.
6. I have been that mother in the NICU waiting room waiting for the 10 minute window to visit my 3-pound baby that hour.

So, I’ve been there.  And I’ve done that.  My older brother one time called me “the strongest person I’ve ever known.”  At the time that floored me.  I wasn’t strong, in my eyes, I was just getting through my life.  (Almost) always with God there.  (Almost) always relying on God.  And I didn’t see what the big deal was to focus on what HAD happened compared to what is NOW or what COULD BE.  So I said to my husband, with such arrogance and pride that typing this now I feel shame, “I’m not broken.”

And then God broke me.

I didn’t even know what broken meant.  I can barely look at pictures of Johnathan’s first year, I was in such a broken place for most of it.  He broke me until I was a sobbing wreck on my knees begging Him – begging Him for release from it.

During my Bible reading yesterday, I read the study notes for 1 Chronicles 21:1:

Now Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel.

The study notes reference 2 Samuel 24:1:

Again the anger of the LORD was aroused against Israel, and He moved David against them to say, “Go, number Israel and Judah.”

As they reference the second verse, they say, “The apparent contradiction can be resolved by recognizing that though Satan is the author of all evil, he cannot exercise his evil intentions apart from the permission of God.  Moreover, God could use him to accomplish His own purposes of judgement (1 Kings 22:19-23) or discipline, as here with David.”

As I read this, the song, “Take My Life,” by Micah Stampley went through my mind.  The third verse of that song says:

Brokenness, brokenness is what I long for

Brokenness, brokenness is what I need

Brokenness, brokenness is what You want for me

And I thought to myself, before God could use Gregg and me in the way He desires to use us, He needed to break each one of us.  We each needed to quit dealing with things on our own.  We needed to quit being “strong” and handling everything on our own then turning to God and saying, “Thank you for seeing us through that.  I’ve always trusted You’d be there.”  He needed us in the midst of brokenness to fall prone to Him and give everything, all of ourselves over to Him.

The chorus of that song says:

So take my Heart and mold it
Take my mind, transform it
Take my will, conform it
To Yours to Yours oh, Lord

Jesus gave a parable of “The Seeds” in Luke 8:4-15.  In that parable, the seeds that grew and yielded crop were grown in “good soil.”

Do you know what I have to do to my soil to make it good enough to grow my crops?  I have to break the ground – to till the earth – break through it with a sharp edge and break up the hard earth to soft, pliable dirt.  I have to remove rocks and roots.  I have to work fertilizer through it (can someone come up with a euphemism for fertilizer? – heh).  I have to continually pull out weeds and bad plants.  I have to battle back bugs and pests and scavengers.  When I do those things, then my earth is good, good for seed to grow and yield a healthy crop.

For God to be able to do His work through me, for me to be able to produce for God, my heart had to be broken like the ground gets broken.  And then He had to pull all the bad stuff out, the roots of my own pride and arrogance.  I had to work through the brokenness like fertilizer gets worked through the soil so that I can feed my seeds.  And armed with the full Armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18), I am always ready to battle the firery darts and arrows of the enemy – the pests and scavengers that want to destroy and consume my crops.

Once I was broken, recognized the brokenness, and turned to God with it, I am able to say to God, “So take my Heart and mold it; take my mind, transform it; take my will, conform it; to Yours to Yours oh, Lord.”  I can say that with absolute sincerity and purpose, desiring to be completely sanctified for God.  So that every part of me – of my life – will be used for God’s purposes.

Out of my broken earth sprung this blog.  Out of my broken earth, my writing was revised.  What God’s plan is next, I don’t know.  But I know that I’m absolutely ready to be used by Him, and I look forward to it, with no pride and no arrogance getting in the way.

Hallee

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Tags: Bible, Christian Faith, God, holiness, Jesus Christ, King David, Micah Stampley, Parable of the Seeds, Stormie Omartian