The Blessing in Broken

Broken.  It doesn’t seem that it would be a good thing.  But when you turn around the way you look at it…

When something is broken, you face the decision.  Can I or should I repair it?  Or has its time come?

The other day I found this on my stove.

I was surprised.  I was a little sad.

I don’t know how it happened, yet it had.  Two pieces.  A clean break.  Or was it?

I wondered if I should try to piece it back the way it was?  But…

Like most things, this plate had a story.  Yet, I’m not really sure where that story began.  I know that I had it for as long as I remembered being an adult.  I know that it had originally hung on a wall.  Not my wall.  But it had a metal gadget that was attached that looked like it had. It also used to be something other than just black but it had lost the design that decorated its surface long ago.  I knew that over more moves than I could count, but I’m guessing maybe 12, it had been carefully wrapped in paper and boxed and unboxed and unwrapped and it was still with me.  Maybe thirty years later.  It had lasted…it was worn, but it had hung in there with me, and I with it.  That was its story.

So given its story, I had to consider what to do.  And after careful consideration….I tossed it in the trash without remorse.  OK, maybe just a bit of guilt now as I write about it.

I was able to consider that it had no value to me now other than the fact that it had been with me.  There was no reason that I needed or in fact wanted to keep it.  It was not an important part of my direction.  So I very unceremoniously said goodbye.

Well actually, I tossed it before I could give it a second thought and hang onto its pieces.

As a person, I have been broken.  I have felt myself shattered to pieces and yet I fought and argued to put myself back together in the way that I had been.  Or at least the way that I remembered that I had been.  Or the way that I thought I should be. The pieces didn’t fit like they should, not smoothly, but then, maybe they never had.

As I look around my life, I have hung onto so many broken bits; so many incomplete and messy stories.  I have my children’s schoolwork in incomplete disarray; because that’s what a good mother does.  I have pieces of fabric and dried up paint because…well, just in case art projects come up that might require such things.  I have spices.  Oh Lord do I have spices that have been with me since the dawn of time and may be, just may be been used in a recipe a time or two.  But there they sit.  Broken from lack of use. (It’s probably more like stuck together or dried up.  But roll with me on this.)

What is the sense in keeping pieces that no longer work?  And maybe, just maybe they came apart because they were meant to.

There is a blessing in broken.  It means that you get the opportunity to throw out the old and put things back together in a way that you couldn’t have imagined before.  Or it means you get a fresh slate; without a shape in mind, you can be anything that works.  You can rebuilt from the ground up.

I’ve been broken.  But as I think about it, maybe I was trying to force pieces to fit into ways they never should have.  I’m working on putting the pieces together around the dreams that haven’t left me since I was young.  So, what I thought I was supposed to look like and tried to make fit no longer matters.  Because that was broken. And being broken does allow a brand new blessing.