Five-Minute Friday: Broken

So, it's Friday. Which means I'm blogging. (This is only one in a flurry of recent examples where I'm learning to appreciate rules I adopt for myself. After years of embracing freedom and "grace," which in addition to its truth can be a euphemism for tolerating or even embracing my lack of self-control, I'm starting to fully get what Paul meant in Galatians about the Law being a guardian for us.)

So even if I have nothing else to say am too lazy to blog the rest of the week, I suddenly seem to have blogging ambition on Friday. I typically go over and see what my buddy Ruth wrote, and then head over to Lisa-Jo Baker's blog to make it official.

[Drafter's Note: I cheated a little this week, and this is more like Six-and-a-Half-Minute Friday... I am presently typing on an iPad, on a train, and so I allowed myself some extra time to counteract the autocorrect- and turbulence-related backing-and-filling...]

GO

In feeling my own throat, in considering that TV show I was watching involving a serial killer who strangles women, I find myself wondering why this sacred place, this passage for voice and breath, should be so scandalously vulnerable. Just skin and a thin veil of muscle, poorly guarded, an undefended keep.

The heart, too--Ingrid Michaelson's voice warbles in my wonderings--so vaguely enshrined in thin ribs, too easily accessed, punctured, broken, lost. It's tempting--unavoidable, inevitable--to second-guess the craftsmanship. Where are the plates of heavy bone, layered like marble slabs to keep us safe? 

In short, why are we breakable? Did He not consider all that we might lose in an instant, a sudden sacrifice to misstep or violence? But He chose to make us fragile, to let us be broken, whether it's a stubbed toe, bent and bruised, or a fractured heart, murmuring and fading. He designed us this way, and encourages us through every means available to leave ourselves that way: easy to accessed, effortless to hurt, but open to a world of wild emotion, compassionate even in the face of darkness.

It's possible, to some degree, to choose the other path. To become hard-hearted. But it's preferable to fracture and then be mended; to break, and be remade unbroken.

STOP