fragile heart
We think the sacred is in what is set-apart, preserved, and kept spotless. But the holy is in the broken.
What’s shattered is the sacred.
Whatever bones inside of us have been fractured, whatever aches when we walk or groans when we sit still too long. The discomfort is our Horeb, our meeting place with God.
It’d be nicer, I think—you may agree—if holiness—wholeness, were something that meant untampered, untracked, and unbruised.
This is—quite spectacularly—not the case. Being whole is a path open to even those who have been, are, and will be broken. The cross is a disruption of our comfortable definitions of wholeness, of salvation. The cross is, more than a triumph of wrath or power or glory, a meeting two thieves at their worst moment. The cross was not a solitary undertaking. The cross was love walking to those on the farthest edges of the acceptable, outside the city gate, outside the city's welcome, and hanging his hat with them. The cross is disruption—bad news to those who have much to lose—but it is mostly comfort. The cross is embrace, an assurance that it is our weakest swaths of skin, our most tender, bruised hearts—these are where God is.