Beauty in the Brokenness

Earth shattering days.

And I'm not talking about the good kind.

 I am not overly dramatic, so I should preface the following by saying earth shattering is relative.  But the events that have taken place in my life in the past few months have shaken me to my core.  They say bad things come in threes.  I think my threes must have been building up for a few years, because mine came in many multiples of three.  And all of a sudden I was left standing in the midst of rubble, destruction, pain: looking at my life, feeling as if the mountain top I had been living on had crumbled around me.  The thrill of being at the top exchanged for the despair of being enveloped by the casualties of the fall.  I have lived parts of my life angry at God, hard-hearted and bitter.  The one thing I knew I could not do, can never do again, is go back to that dark place.  And so, what do I do?  I put one foot dutifully in front of the other, checking off the to-do list of a "good Christian girl", and plodded on, all the while trying desperately to find another mountain top, another hill. And yet, here I sit, still in the valley, with mountains still shaken and hills still fallen.  I once told you I never cried, these past few months have made a liar out of me.  I have cried, I have screamed, I have begged, I have cursed (sorry, Mom!), I have run, and oh, how I have prayed.  I have asked God to lead me back up to a mountain top in my life, back to where the view is beautiful and I am no longer surrounded by brokenness.  And how sweetly the Lord asked me to see the beauty in the brokenness. 

I want to know God, every aspect of Him, intimately. Psalms 34:18 says that He is near to the brokenhearted and saves those crushed in spirit.  I had never known that God who was near to the brokenhearted, until I became the brokenhearted.  Truly, I have lived a blessed and pain-free life.  Until those (relatively speaking) earth-shattering days.  I can now tell you without a doubt, I know the God that is near to the brokenhearted.  Because that God has wrapped me in His arms and assured me and re-assured me.  The same God who spoke the world into existence knows the number of hairs on my head.  He loves me. Even when my mountains crumble, perhaps ESPECIALLY when my mountains crumble, His love, His promise of peace...it will never end.  I fear that so much of my life I have lived knowing ABOUT God, following His do's and dont's, (self) righteously checking the boxes, rather than truly KNOWING God.  Ann Voskamp says, "The modern-day Pharisees focus on sin avoidance and not firstly on Savior ardency." Trying to do the right thing, or avoid the wrong thing, rather than passionately pursuing an intimate knowledge of the One I love.  A head knowledge of my Savior, book knowledge of my Lord, it wasn't enough when my heart was in shambles.  This brokenness, the crumbling, it forced me to cling ever tighter to my God-and how can you cling to what you don't trust-and how can you trust what you don't know?  It necessitated a search for Him where I had previously only been cognizant of His existence, but never experienced it: in my pain amidst the rubble of a crumbling peak.  And I found Him there, arms opened wide, sovereign, all-knowing, all-powerful, completely trustworthy, near to my broken heart, and absolutely, stunningly, beautiful.