mending | Sarah Markley

I have at least six of my daughter’s toy horses in a bag with broken legs and hooves.

I have a sewing basket for needles, thread and homeless buttons. I have a place on my desk for tape to mend unintentionally ripped coloring pages. I have boxes of batteries to fix electronic toys that have made their last sounds.

I fix broken things.

I put bandages on three-year-old knees and use words to bind up little spirits who’ve been wounded. [I do the best I can to fix those].

As a mother, I’m a fixer of the broken.

But today, tonight, I need a broken heart. In fact I’m looking for one. And I don’t want to fix it.

I need a heart that breaks for the world: a heart that hurts for the lost, for the less than, and for the needy. I need a heart that is broken for the hungry, for the ones without homes and for the fatherless.

I want eyes that well up when I witness oppression or slavery, for war-torn families and famine-ridden land. I want to break in half for the ones who are dying, who are starving, who’ve been victimized.

I need a broken heart.

I want to feel for the unloved, the unwanted, and the unneeded. I even want to break for those that hurt and abuse, because they’ve been abused [and You love them].

I want You to ravage me, ruin me and destroy me for normal life.

I need a broken heart, one that

glue,

tape,

or words can’t fix.

Because only with a broken heart can I learn how to love.

Do you?

The Fear of Mending

I used to be afraid of healing.

What it would cost.

What it would mean.

What it would require of me.

Years ago, trying to function in my marriage while having an affair was like trying to run a marathon on a broken leg. It just wasn’t working and there was something really, really wrong.

I knew things had to change and part of that included my healing, but I was worried about what that mending would cost.

What would it take to stitch up my heart, to make it pliable again when it had become so hard? As if the pain from the healing would be worse than the pain in my current state.

Healing takes time I wasn’t wiling to give and energy I didn’t have. It also takes a submission to the Healer that I was reluctant to begin.

And the worst of it, mending requires introspection. Looking at myself, at a blackened heart, is ugly. I didn’t want to see it and I didn’t want anyone else to see it either.

Wounds need time for the air to purify and clean them. Tendons and relationships need to grow back together where they have been severed. Bones and trust need time to form new bonds and new connections.

When the pain in me became to great to bear and the current state of me was uglier than I knew I could repair on my own, I broke in half.

Bones shattering, tendons ripping, ribs cracking, muscles tearing: the ugliness of breaking was almost as great as the carrying of the sin itself.

This is why healing is scary. This is why people stay where they are — filled up with the hurt and the loss and the wrong — because it feels so much safer. The pain we know is easier to medicate the pain we don’t know. And I won’t lie; the tearing hurts.

But this pain was different. It had a purpose. Break in order to mend.

Because it doesn’t end there: in the breaking. The breaking is only the beginning. The Healer breaks, and then He mends.

Now I know that mending, even though it costs energy and time, even though it requires me to be silent and wait, even though it means looking closely at my broken places and ugly scars, is the only way to peace.

Peace with God.

Peace with myself.

And there is no fear in that.

Why do YOU think healing is so difficult and scary?