Like Children Dressing in Our Parent's Clothes

This world is awful.

War. Famine. Prostitution. Boy Soldiers. Child Molesters. Pestilence. Tornadoes. Earthquakes. Heartbreak. Death.


What good in this world could we ever put in any hope in? When things are stripped away and down and out, what is there left to hold on to?

We are a broken race, a destitute people. I can feel the mighty, yet small, hand of the world tensed back, waiting to destroy every single bit of me. Every inch except for the last one, the one that Valerie talks on in "V for Vendetta":

Our integrity sells for so little, but it's all that we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.

And with no reason, that shaking fist is held back, for sometimes reason I do not understand. Maybe once or twice, it has been allowed to press upon me, and the weight behind it, and the ensuing pressure enough to break most bones, to snap them in half, for marrow to seep out. Yet we hold on, we stand fast.

Most of us knows what it is like to be heartbroken, to be wounded. We are, like I mentioned earlier, a broken people. We cover it up, mask the bruises with rouge and eyeliner and coats and ties, and we tell ourselves in the mirror that, "everything is okay, everything is fine." But it is not okay and it is not fine. Look at us! Wandering like zombies, shuffling our feet towards some dream, towards some manufactured princesses and cookie cutter houses. They are all cliffs, really, all just holograms and mirages waving in front of us on hot gravel at the edge, bidding us to do its will, to take another step forward and another step out. We, with scars from our heads to our toes, with lashes from past beatings, with knife wounds in the back and open chest cavities where our hearts used to be, we can feel the breath of the hot day, simmering and sizzling our lives away, but there is something deeper, an old magic, a deeper yearning like a cool breeze, a mountain snowcapped in the distance. A place that we feel alive at.

A place that makes us feel so small, yet so large at the same time. John Piper says of this: nobody goes to the Grand Canyon to improve his self-esteem. Why would they go there? The reason is that deeply written in the human soul is that we were not made to be made much of, but to make much of God.

We are a broken people, charading and moonlighting in silly capes and cowls, but there is hope, there is love. And that love can fill us up, can unwrinkle those old crow's feet, can loosen that scar tissue up. It can break down the walls of doubt and misery and lifelessness that have encamped themselves in that place where your heart used to reside. It is a love too big and too bold and too bright, so bright that it should consume everyone and everything in one bold white light, but it does and it doesn't.

But how can we, dusty and discarded, carry such love inside us? " 'But I'm so small I can barely even see how this great love can be inside of me?' Look at your eyes they're small in size but they see enormous things." (Aaron Weiss)

We in and of ourselves could house no such thing, but it diminishes itself somewhat, it came down in the form of man, a second Adam to our first Adam, bled and dead, and breathed life in us anew. Diminished but still perfectly magnificent. We can take in the scope and breadth and depth of a mountain with our small eyes. How much more so can G-d, perfectly grant us His Sweet and Perfect love through His Son?

We are a broken people, we've tripped over our own feet too much, and made a mockery of anything that could be considered sacred. We have tipped our own scales, but in this, there is a beauty and a plan. And we, in our own ignorance and blindness, miss such sweet things. We are broken, but we can be healed.

Lean, brothers. Lean, sisters. Wake up, Oh Sleeper!

To the Broken,
Our wounds will be bound and healed by Love.