He heals the brokenhearted
    and binds up their wounds. – Psalm 147:3

Today I find myself pondering broken things

It is apparently not true that a broken bone grows back stronger

Nor is it true that it is destined to be forever fragile

What is true is that while the bone is healing

Often protected with a cast

The muscles around it atrophy from lack of use

The surrounding bone even growing less dense

This is supposed to be a temporary condition

One remedied with physical therapy

The broken bone itself is not the only thing that must be mended

I think about the things I have broken or sprained

I broke or sprained a wrist playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker as a child

I can’t remember which, though I remember having to wear a hard cast

Dinner theater in the round

Practicing the fight scene where I battled Annie

As she tried to get me to eat with a fork

And Helen, my character, refused

She pins me to a chair and the chair is supposed to topple

Only it was very heavy, my wrist trapped underneath

A few years back I broke a foot

A child ran right into me on the basketball court

And I fell awkwardly, trying to protect the expensive camera

Learning the hard way that a foot is actually more expensive to fix

I remember the physical therapy, often painful

Having to wear a boot

But avoiding surgery

Thankful when I could walk again

Hurting my other foot by relying on it too heavily

Changing my gait

Until finally I could trust the healed foot to bear my weight

Then I think about other broken things

Broken relationships, broken hopes

The kinds of breaks that do not always heal as easily as bone

Taking more than time and more than therapy

Taking forgiveness and surrender

Not always the easiest things to find

Especially in the midst of a broken heart

But like a broken bone

There is more impacted than just the injury itself

Our trust atrophies as we stop trusting people

A weakening, not of bone, but of how we see ourselves and others

You can only protect the injury for so long

If you keep guarding your heart

You will find that you damage other things too

The original injury having a far deeper impact on your life than it should

Allowing words spoken over us in anger to last a lifetime

We cannot change our circumstances

Cannot avoid pain, no matter how much we try and insulate our hearts

We cannot control others, not how they see us or how they treat us

The only thing we can change is ourselves

Change doesn’t mean acting as if the break never happened

But offering grace to our fellow travelers

Just as beaten up by life as we have been

Just as broken

It is true that hurt people hurt people

But we have the power to break that cycle

Responding not in kind but with kindness

And I have found, just like I wasn’t ever going to really heal

By doing my own physical therapy,

We need a therapist to push us to use muscles that have atrophied

To trust that we can put weight on a broken limb again

We need Jehovah Rapha

The Lord who heals

We need Him to challenge us, to convict us, to transform us

To walk in the humility that comes from having lived through hard things

Because the goal is not to hobble around

The goal is to walk in holy confidence

To walk in power

To walk in freedom