Sufficiently Broken

2024 cracked me open like a glow stick. 

I facetiously asked God how much more he could take from me, and I guess I’d reminded him that he forgot my last sliver of dignity and my last shred of pride.

Gone with the wind. 

It was with the final blow to my hard-won life and all the beautiful things I’d accumulated that I wondered what he could possibly want with a jar of clay he had so carelessly let slip through his fingers. 

Somehow, some way, he took more. If I were a house, he was dismantling the piers and beams and slabs. He was melting the paint and stripping the slats. 

Just when I thought I couldn’t become less, somehow more of nothing I became. 

The more things broke the more my perspective shifted. If your house’s foundation were faulty, you wouldn’t just get a new couch. You wouldn’t just upgrade the light fixtures and reinforce the windows. Termites have hollowed out the timber board. Humidity has cracked the concrete. The foundation has eroded, and it must be restored in its totality. 

It was then that I asked the question that I suspected was finally the right one: have I been sufficiently broken to be rebuilt? 

The ways we contort to sustain ourselves is exhausting, isn’t it? At some point, it becomes akin to witchcraft, all the manipulation and distortion and ways we cope with what we know isn’t good for us but pretend it’s good enough. 

I won’t tell you the reconstruction is pleasant; it’s entirely not. It’s jarring, loud and offensive. But what can you do when heaven humbles you? Lean in and learn. Power seeps in through the cracks of you, you broken jar of clay. 

-Written by Christy Bradley