hope is the missing part

My best friend Lis had her first kiss stolen last weekend. Some mexican from work did it, despite how many times she said no. I cried when she told me because deserves so much better than for something like that to happen to her.

I hate that sometimes what we want out of life is taken from us kicking and screaming. I hate that blind disrespect can taint such well-protected innocence. I don't know why I feel like this tragedy happened to me too. Maybe because we've been friends since third grade. I'm angry with him. And angry that God would let something like that happen to someone like her. The first words she said after she told the story of how it happened were about forgiveness. Mine were far from that idea, and still are. She's a different kind of strong than I am, I think. She has the ability to bounce back after being knocked down. I have the ability to get knocked down and stay there until I'm ready to get up- usually much longer than anyone else I know. It takes strength to forgive, but it takes strength to endure the mud too. Maybe I drag myself through the mud, but at least I endure it even at high costs.

I'm not being pessimistic when I say that everything around us is broken in some way. We may not always see it- but there are cracks and pieces missing or stolen from nearly every life we encounter. The world operates on a broken system. We achieve and lose on a broken leg, broken attitude, broken heart. There's something hurting in each of us, even the happy ones. We all leave a trail of wreckage behind every step we take toward a direction, forward or backward. Our success is someone else's failure, and our failure is someone else's gain. It seems the law of consequences rules the word.

I know that I personally do what I can to learn from the mistakes I've made, the hearts I've broken, and my own heart that I've broken without anyone's help. Learning is the hard part. Changing is the necessary part. Hope is the missing part. I don't want to slide back into a place that has imprisoned me so many times before. I crave freedom and room to run and fresh air. I long to be outside and not just analyze it through my window.

Despite creeps like that mexican, I want to believe that people are good. The truth is that we aren't really. I tend to make a lot more mistakes than I ever do good. I criticize others but I criticize myself the most. And yet I find myself rooting for the underdog in all of us. We are just as capable of good as we are of evil. Things can be good again if I cling to the one Thing I know to always be good. I can be as angry as I want at the brokeness of the world, but I can't help but smile when I get to the end of that thought because He always takes something terrible and uses it for our, and His, good. I may never understand the ways that I have been broken and am broken, but I would rather focus on the glue that's holding me together every second I'm alive. My terra cotta heart will be smashed again and again, but there is an unearthly grout that will fix whatever is left into what He desires of me, for my benefit and His glory.

I may get knocked down again and again and again, but He will always pick me up. He can heal what we cannot. And when the pieces get too small- when my heart is just clay dust, He'll start again with me and mold me with new, soft, clay. He'll make me new again and breathe His breath into my lungs again and again to revive me. The broken world can't do anything to me that He cannot fix. They can take everything from me but He will still remain in me. I will still be His. And no one can take that from me, even in death. Even in death I will have freedom and room to run and fresh air. Even when I take my part in belonging to the brokeness of this world, He is still good. He will always be good.


eb