Broken

God knit you together in your mother's womb. He knows every hair on your head and every fiber of your being. Do you believe this? 

I do. 

And yet, we have to be real about the broken world in which we live. Bad attitudes, bad habits, bad choices, addictions, sin, sickness, disease - these are realities. And when I think about these things and look in the mirror, there's something inside of me that says, this can't be who God had in mind. 

We even have a narrative around this. We have a narrative that says that one day, God will restore us to who He intended us to be in the first place. When we get to Heaven, we will meet persons we once knew, but without all of their baggage. We will see them in their full image of Him. 

We say this, and it breaks our hearts a little. It does. It makes us feel like everyone is just a shadow of themselves, like there is something missing or something inherently wrong or damaged in every single person we meet. Including ourselves. There's something about us that's...off. 

We hear this a lot more in our current culture as everyone talks about finding themselves and throwing off their trauma and uncovering who they are supposed to be. Some will even throw it back in your face - this is who I am, and if you can't handle it, that's your problem, not mine. We've become almost militant about "finding" our "true" selves and forcing the world to reckon with us. 

We all just feel...broken. We feel like failures. Like there is something fundamentally wrong with us that we'll never get back on this side of eternity, no matter how hard we spend our days fighting for it. What we all want most of all, I think, is to not feel this way, but look around you at this fallen world - how can we not? 

This is magnified all the more for those of us who do have faith, who do have this narrative that God knit us together and that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." We consider ourselves and...it doesn't seem fearful and wonderful. It doesn't seem like this is the "very good" design God had in mind when He created order out of chaos, and it certainly doesn't seem like we have any semblance to bear to the image of the One who created us. 

We feel broken, like failures, and with this narrative, we feel like we've disappointed God. Oh, how far we have fallen from who He had in mind when He knit us together. 

In rare moments of indignation when we come close to accepting that this may just be how we are, we lash out at God - how could this be what He had in mind? How could He dare create us this way? 

But at our core, for most of us, we know that we weren't supposed to be this way.

But...

What if we were? 

What if - hear me out on this - this is part of God's plan, too? 

(Stick with me on this. It's very important. See you tomorrow.)