Season of Lent - Week 5 - Brokenness

The word “brokenness” is thrown around a lot these days both inside and outside the church. Since we can’t be too careful about the words we use, I want to propose a definition and reflect on what it has to teach us as we journey through Lent. Brokenness is our experienced inability to make life work. It usually flows from either conviction of sin (see Psalm 32 and 51), or intense suffering of some kind (e.g., Psalm 88).

Brokenness stops us in our tracks. We experience running into something and this something breaks us, tears and pulls at us and disables us in some way. We come to the end of ourselves and are filled with a combination of helplessness, sorrow, anger, depression, fear and/or shame. Regardless of the cause, when we are broken we are simply unable to keep going the way we have been going. We become desperate for relief, comfort, clarity and some semblance of control. We long for a sense of safety and rest to return.

As the elders have discussed how to help Redemption Spokane become a “safe place,” the issue of brokenness has come up, particularly in how we share our brokenness and how we listen to others sharing their own experiences. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to express brokenness. For example, social media has proven to be a most unhelpful form of expressing brokenness because it doesn’t draw upon the resources of face to face relationships. It is too easy to hide behind our technology and avoid considering the preciousness of others as well as avoiding responsibility for our own actions and words. We often use social media to simply generate sympathy for our plight, but it rarely translates into actual relational support because there is very little accountability on either side. We need the presence of others, not just sympathy.

Those of us who are hurting often ask, “How do I know when it’s safe to share?” This is a difficult question involving many factors. Generally, it is safe to share your brokenness in the context of a relationship in which you have a measure of reasonable trust. Those of us who hear the story of someone’s pain have a responsibility to listen well and resist fixing; we need to hold our friends’ pain up to the healing presence of Christ and seek to be present to our friend, no matter how uncomfortable or awkward that might get. At times, we offer practical assistance. Those of us who share also have responsibility in this - we need to share our brokenness in relationship to the healing presence of Christ and not in a way that is asking another person to save us. Many of us can sense when our boundaries are being threatened by a friend who is broken and unknowingly looking to us to fix things.

What does all this have to do with Lent? Lent is a time when we pay attention to our brokenness, inability and need so that we might grow in experiencing the provision of Christ for us in deeper ways. I encourage you to begin to take stock of your broken places, the places where you feel stuck and hopeless. Begin to ask God to speak into them and shed his light there. Take courage from God’s love and light and begin to share your burdens with the Christian brothers and sisters around you. Lent tells us that none of us are alone and none of us suffer in vain. We will come to find that in the sufferings of Jesus, our sufferings find healing redemption.