Embracing My Brokenness
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 27 seconds
Like all of us, I embrace a million shards of my brokenness.
My brokenness existed before Jan died, but now the shards have multiplied, and the fragments are dangerous.
None of us are perfect; until we embrace our brokenness, we have no hope of repairing our broken lives.
Frustrated over my lack of progress in repairing my brokenness, I opened Evergreen by Kirsten Robinson.
I read her poem on embracing damage in my chilly, barren home.
The Japanese have a method
of repairing broken things
they take fragments
shards pieces bits
and affix them back
together
with goldThe cracks
gilded in their splendor
make the whole
more beautiful
than it was beforeThis is the art
of embracing damage
this is recognizing beauty
in broken things
When Jan and I married, the Rabbi said,
Now Janice and Richard will break the glass wine bottle. Even as the glass shatters, so may their marriage never break! It is a clear message of the brokenness of their prior lives, and they will spend their lives putting the shards of glass back together as they build a life together.
We worked to build a life worth living every day we were married.
May I, now aa a widow, be blessed to be able to embrace my brokenness and seek to repair the damage?
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We are all broken. The challenge is not to repair the shards of our lives but to accept our frailness and rise and overcome our weaknesses.
Before Jan died, I never doubted that I would be able to overcome my failures and pick myself up.
But in the early weeks as a widow, my life was shattered into a million pieces.
The suggestion that I might one day rise and heal was ludicrous.
