Breaking Point

To understand how it could be possible that we're not as broken as we feel, we have to understand something about brokenness: it's universal. 

Everything in creation has its breaking point. There's nothing in this world that you can't break. 

A cockroach can reportedly survived a nuclear bomb, but stomp on it with a good boot, and it's done for. 

Diamond is one of the hardest substances in the world, but it can be chiseled and hammered and chipped away at. 

I was walking my dog a few weeks ago and saw a bunny hopping across the road with its back foot dangling off its hind leg, clearly broken. 

The clouds come together, and then they wisp away and break up back into the blue sky. 

Silence is shattered by noise. 

Darkness is penetrated by light. 

Everything you've ever come across in this big, grand world can be broken. 

And what's interesting is that almost none of it breaks in the same way. 

Even if you were to use a hammer to smash a bunch of different objects, none of them would break in the same way. A piece of wood might splinter. A banana would smush. A rock would shatter. A piece of glass, shatter in an entirely different way still. 

It's as though there are invisible seams running through everything that, at first glance, we think must be holding that thing together but when we look more closely, we see that these are the seams along which that thing breaks. Because in a fallen world, it will break. 

One of my favorite movies reminds us that human beings are not exempt from this breaking. "Every man has his breaking point," the line goes. All it takes, it continues, is pressure and time. 

Pressure and time and every single one of us will break. We know this. We see it all around us. Abuse, addiction, divorce, anger, jealousy, rage, outrage, injustice, depression, anxiety, disability, disease. The list goes on and on. No matter where we look, we can't help but be confronted by the brokenness all around us. 

This fallen world...sucks. 

But remember what we were talking about just a week or two ago, about how God made the first provisions for our fallen world when He sacrificed an animal to cover us with its skin? 

What if...we're not as broken as we think? 

(I know - I said this yesterday. I promise I'll tell you what I mean tomorrow. But it was important to think about the universality of brokenness first - it's important to know that all things break and to think about how they do that.)