Being Broken

     When I was about six years old, I did something horrible. My mother had this beautiful lead crystal vase that she kept in the kitchen window. The vase caught the light no matter what time of day it was and cast a prismatic rainbow over the entire kitchen. I knew she loved it because she had given me the "don't touch it" speech. Long story short, I touched it. I touched it so much that I broke it. The bottom was still in tact, but there were four pieces of glass where one beautiful piece of perfection once was.

     I had no choice but to gather up the pieces and take them to Mom. She was upset... upset that the vase was broken, upset that I had touched it when she had explicitly told me NOT to touch it, but mostly upset that I had picked up the broken pieces and brought them to her. "You could have really hurt yourself by picking them up," she said to me as she gingerly took the pieces from my hands. "The edges are sharp." 

     I got grounded for touching the vase - totally deserved it. And I helped Mom glue it back together. It took hours, putting glue on one piece and holding it until it bonded with the piece that would stabilize it, then adding another piece and holding it until it bonded with the two other pieces and so on... Finally, it was back together. We set it in the window and sure enough, the light still caught it. But the brokenness of the vase, despite the fact that we had put it back together, had changed the way the light reflected. It was almost twice as bright with new patterns of light bouncing both inside and outside of the vase. Mom stood back and looked at it... a pattern of blue and yellow prisms on her face and she smiled. "The seams where it was broken, they are letting the light through into the glass." 

     I've thought about that incident a lot lately. Mainly because of my brokenness. I never realized, when it was happening, that my mother was teaching me about living in that moment. The brokenness is where the light comes in. I have embraced that and there is no freedom like the freedom that comes with realizing that you are going to get hurt, that it is inevitable. You are going to be broken... it is a certainty. But it is what you do with your brokenness that matters. Will you hide it from the light and make it a crack that just collects dust? Will you set it on the window and wait for the sun to rise so that it can help make the light dance? 

    I often think about brokenness in relation to the church. Churches, the body of Christ, even in this day and age, doesn't accept brokenness well. Television commercials show perfect little hipster families, websites are slick and modern, worship services are more like mini-concerts... and these are wonderful advancements. Unless you are broken. When you are broken, you don't want to see that. You want to see people who might understand you. You want to know that when you enter into a sanctuary you are going to be accepted for your brokenness, not gossiped about or held up as an example of what not to do. 

     When my mother passed away almost a year ago, I stopped going to church. I'm not sure why. My faith in God was at a new place in its growth, a place I had never considered. But I couldn't do church. Maybe it was because the fellowship I needed at that point wasn't with people but with the Lord... maybe I was subversively angry at God and just didn't realize it. I look back now and I think that I didn't go because I was so broken and I couldn't bear the idea of no one addressing my brokenness because I was wearing it, I was living it and I was speaking it but it made me difficult to be around. I needed some light to shine through the cracks... I needed someone to recognize my brokenness in a loving, caring, Christ-like manner. Not with self-righteous indignation. Not with judgement. But with love, unconditional and firm. 

     Then it occurred to me that there is no wonder that most people are put off by Christianity as it stands today. We want perfect. We want perfect people to come to the perfect service. We don't seem to want to upset the applecart of Christian. We are the city on the hill, the problem is that the hill is one that we have built by turning the church into a country club for part-time sinners, a social center where the only outreach we perform is reaching out for more money, building, adding on, etc. The only currency that we need as the situation grows more and more desperate is courage and acceptance. And honesty.... oh to be able to enter a building full of human beings to whom I could open my brokenness, share it, allow them to carry it for me and with me. That, more than anything, more than a building or gathering of people, is what the church should be. We should be seeking out the broken and helping them carry the pieces. They are sharp, those pieces of brokenness and as much as the breaking hurts, carrying the pieces is even more dangerous. We should be offering to carry them. And it seems that we are not. 

     So I will start. I am broken. But there is light inside of me. And the light, should it ever shine on me again, might bounce right off of one of my broken pieces and blind you into believing that it is the broken who need what we have to offer... the broken among us and the broken outside of us looking in, hoping to catch a glimpse of something that might offer them healing.

Other Peoples' Junk

     'Tis the season of the yard sale. Brightly colored signs on street corners beckoning the savvy bargain hunter to an address that promises The One Thing I've Always Needed are as prevalent during the summer in the Midwest as the buzzy, angry June bugs. I grew up in a microscopic town, so small that there were maybe two or three yard sales during the summer. Thank goodness for the Shop N' Save. 

     The Shop N' Save was a dank second-hand store that was in the bigger of the "Shelby" towns in Shelby County. It was right across from the library, right beside the sale barn in the town of Shelbina. The Shop N' Save was a mecca, an aromatic, mysterious and mesmerizing mecca of stuff that I didn't know I wanted or needed until I saw it. Grandma went there for books; Mom went there for these pieces of junk that she would take home and turn into these amazing pieces of furniture. I went there because they went. But I was soon sucked into the magic of the hunt. 

     "Junkin'" is what Mom called it, but it never occurred to me that it was junk. I didn't know where all of the items at the Shop N' Save came from but then again I didn't know where all of the items at the grocery store came from either. So when I talked Mom into buying me the Operation game missing the funny bone at the Shop N' Save for $1 as opposed to the one at Ben Franklin for $10, I asked her. 

     "Shop N' Save is full of other peoples' junk, Honey," she told me one day as I was helping her put a second coat of paint on a dining chair she had acquired for a dollar. "It's a second-hand store." I didn't tell her that I didn't know what she meant by "second-hand." I figured it meant something like there were a bunch of people who had been born with one hand and were selling off all of their stuff to buy a second hand. So they sold their belongings in hopes of gaining enough cash to pay for the operation. Thank goodness I figured it out before I started a telethon or something...

     The other day I was in a second hand store and there was a woman in there who looked as if she was in a constant state of pre-sneeze. She was telling her friend that she didn't "do" yard sales or thrifting or second-hand. "If it's not new, I don't want it..." she probably didn't mean to sound like a snob, but she did... Her friend told her just that and then asked her what exactly she thought her antiques were. "They are expensive is what they are," she said. "They have value because they are special and unique and because someone loved them and kept them in good shape." Her friend saw me listening in on their conversation and smiled at me when I rolled my eyes. 

     I'm packing up my house to move. I'm moving into a second-hand house. It's not brand new. I didn't build it. But it's new to me. It's bigger than our current house... we will have my brother with us in this new/used house. Most of the furniture that is going in it is second-hand. I thought I would be really excited about picking out new furniture, but quickly discovered that I have acquired the pieces that I have through the combining of several households. As the women that came before me passed away, their prized belongings were passed on: bubble glass, Fiestaware, hutch cabinets, hardrock maple living room sets, and various "pretties" like a candy bowl that looked like a chicken... 

     I am of the school of thought that values the second-hand lifestyle. I like the dinged up wood on a cheap used coffee table where kids used to play with race cars or Play-Doh. I love that the leather side chair smells like a mixture of cedar and tobacco, deep and rich. It doesn't bother me at all that second-hand dining room chairs will be covered with an old tablecloth that my grandmother was going to throw out after Christmas my freshman year of college but I saved it, knowing that I would use it someday. 

     When my mother passed away I went through most of her things. I made snap decisions to keep or get rid of. I tried to be ruthless and it was going well until I stumbled upon the locket that was worth nothing...

     The locket bore the initials of my great, great grandmother on my grandmother's side. It was copper, but plated with gold and there were little marks all over it. I took it to a local appraiser to see if she knew what the marks on the locket were. "This is priceless!" She smiled down at the piece with tears in her eyes. My heart leapt into my throat. I had found a treasure! A REAL treasure. 

     "As far as money goes, it's not worth much," she explained. "But these little marks on the back, notice how some of them are darker than others?" I nodded. "Those are teeth marks... she wore this locket and babies would sit on her lap and teethe on it. There's at least three generations of teeth marks here. They get darker as they get older." Mom had never shown it to me; I wonder if she forgot it was there. It had been under the bottom board of the jewelry box along with a delicate, beautiful little bitty white gown wrapped first in plastic wrap and then in tissue paper. I knew the dress; she was photographed in it on her one month birthday. There was no tag in the dress and the stitches were hand stitches, crooked and determined. Grandma's mom had made the dress by hand. I figured that the last set of teethmarks on the locket, the newest set, were probably Mom's.

     I found a shadow box on sale at Hobby Lobby and bought it. I put the locket and the dress in the shadow box and hung it on the wall of my now-old house. I just packed it away the other day to hang in my newer-old house. A new piece of art from two old treasures.

     I couldn't help but think of the unhappy woman I experienced earlier in the week as I held the shadow box. I know that she is unhappy because she just doesn't get it. Maybe she has never lost someone she loves; maybe she doesn't know what it is like to want for fine things and know they are out of your reach so you make them instead. Maybe she is just shallow, it could be that simple to explain. I feel sorry for her. She is out of place in this world. There's no such thing as truly brand new. Even if you buy it and have it sent to you, someone else has tested it for you. So really everything that decorates our lives is other peoples' junk. Even we are other peoples' junk, products of their idea of usefulness when it comes to us and categorized by the value that they place on us. We are second-hand spirits, all of us shaped by what we have absorbed through our experiences with others, all of us dinged up or scratched by encounters that will never go away. I choose to accept that about myself. I choose to be grateful for my teethmarks, my scratches, my defects and the spots of me that are rubbed smooth from love and infinite care. It could be worse than being other peoples' junk. You could be other peoples' trash.