My trusty little iPhone 5s is broken – the screen, anyway. The phone slipped out of my hand at the front door many months ago as I was fishing for my keys and landed screen-down on the cement. I feared the worst as I picked it up and slowly turned it over to assess the damage, squinting at it through one eye to fend off certain fiery darts of regret. But I was pleasantly surprised to find only one crack – that started at the top and ended just above the power button! Ordinarily I would chide myself to be more careful all the way to the phone repair kiosk in the mall, do some shopping for an hour or so and pick up my good-as-new phone with a shiny, crack-free screen.

Ordinarily. But the truth is, I had just replaced the sim card that lived out its natural life at no small expense, not to mention already replacing the screen once (twice?). So I couldn’t let the kiosk-guy bail me out again so soon; I was just going to live with a cracked screen until it didn’t work any longer (or until I couldn’t take it anymore!)

Within days, I began to notice that the original single crack was starting to grow shoots and branches. Then I found tiny chips at the very top and under the power button that have since grown to quite respectable divots. Still determined to make this screen last as long as possible, I tried my best to ignore the flaws and was managing fairly well until I began to notice hazy brown distortions on either side of the larger cracks that left me reading everything at an angle and in just the right light. I think it might be time….

Broken things don’t get better on their own. They need to be tended to, cared for and mended. And if not, over time, the broken places just continue to shoot and branch and chip until it seems impossible to make them new again. Just like us.

How many times do we push away our pain, ignore our anger or run from memories that have left cracks so deep we sometimes talk ourselves into thinking they don’t really matter. But broken things don’t get better on their own….and neither do broken people.

We need to be tended to, cared for and mended, and that takes work….and courage….and trust….and vulnerability. And it also takes surrender – surrender of the very things that hurt us the deepest in order for God to begin the healing that we need most. There are many things I can do for myself, and I am working really hard at those things, but my true hope and healing come from the one who knows me best and loves me most. And he happens to specialize is mending broken things.

There is always hope, no matter what the picture looks like. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with God about your own broken places. He cares about each one and has a way of bringing beauty into the mending that creates something better than we could have ever hoped or imagined. God knows what you’ve been through and “there’s a kind of love that God only knows.”

I’m kind of becoming living proof of that. =)

From my heart to yours,

Shellie ♥

God Only Knows

For King and Country