Strong in the Broken Places and Jumbo Shrimp
Friends,
My kids’ elementary school had a fun run this week.
Fun run. That’s how they described it. As if these two words belonged together. They strike my ear in the same fashion as jumbo shrimp does. Are we running or are we having fun, because I am up for either, but seldom find I can do both at the same time.
Perhaps that is how the season of Lent feels to some of us. Spiritual Discipline leads to freedom? The victory of the resurrection is best prepared for by being reminded that we will die? And yet I find myself in this season so grateful for all the wisdom God pours out in the hard and challenging parts of our lives. Lent reminds us of what we have been through while helping train us for what is yet to come.
Ernest Hemingway writes in A Farewell to Arms that “the world breaks every one and afterward many become strong at the broken places.” For me this gets at the heart of the work of grace and the call of the church. We work in the broken places with broken people.
Strong in the broken places may sound like a fun run, but the testimony of our faith is that this is exactly what occurs when God’s grace pours into the broken and hurting parts of our lives. For that to happen, we must first confess, we must admit, that we have broken and wounded parts to our story and invite God to redeem them and make us strong in the very places we have felt our greatest weakness. After all, it is in the wounds of Jesus on Good Friday that reveal so much about the heart of God and the nature of this world. This is the journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, and it is a sacred privilege to share it with you.
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. –The Apostle Paul, after a fun run; also found in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10.
Blessings,
Pastor Ben