It’s Friday night. Know what that means? I’m up all night working on a website.

I made a resolution at the beginning of this week to have boundaries in my work. I have some control over that. But sometimes, your database just doesn’t like you, and your file transfer software just can’t even. Hours of mindless waiting… can’t do it. Needed to blog.

So I’m listening to Coldplay’s “Fix You.” If you have not heard this song today, please do so now.


The song is all about when things don’t go as planned. But not in a, “I wanted a cappuccino, not a flat white” kind of way.

But in a,

“i risked it all for this…
and i lost

everything”

kind of way.

Many people around me are going through times where this feels like the inescapable reality.

 

Maybe you feel like you took the wrong path after high school, and you can never go back.
Maybe you feel like you tore apart a relationship (or a whole group of relationships) beyond repair.
Maybe you’re feel trapped in your marriage. Or trapped in the aftermath of a broken marriage.
Maybe you’ve experienced a freak tragedy, and you don’t think you’ll ever hope again.
Maybe you’re living a double life. You can’t tell anyone, but you can’t stop.

I know people going through these things. And you do, too. Maybe all too well.

Friends. Family. Strangers. Self.
(Are you a stranger to yourself?)

People.

When you see people in broken situations, sometimes all you want to do is just
fix them.

To make it better.

To clean up the mess and put back the pieces and
erase the history.

But people, they are not broken lamps.

Of course, you know this. This has been the focus of most of our culture’s philosophical trends at the moment:

The glorification of brokenness.

You see, in the previous generation, we were very strict. Judgmental. We tried
fixing people.

Allow me to tell you an historical account of spiritual genocide.

It was a well-intended effort, gone very, very wrong. It runs in our blood like poison.

It’s as if we saw the sick
and feared their sickness
and so we got out a 10-foot firehose of medicine
and shot it down their throats
and, in doing so,
we drowned them.

The survivors, they hobbled back to the drawing board to try to find a way to do something different for their kids and peers. (And, ultimately, were motivated by their own pain. Which is not inherently bad, or good, I guess, but it made the efforts all the more determined.)

So they swung the opposite way. “I will be anything but them,” they vowed, to whom, well, to anybody besides who they vowed to, I guess.

“Their medicine drowned us,” they observed, and thus concluded, “we need to give people time to heal.”

So when they found their children getting sick, they embraced their children and their sickness, confident that, in time, they would heal. And in fact, what is so wrong about the sickness, anyway? The previous generation inundated us with medicine. We hate medicine.

They hated sickness. So perhaps we will embrace sickness as natural and even good.

Yet these children ended up with the same fate: death.
But what is so wrong with death?

And so, this generation
embraced death
so as not to be like them.

They decided it would be better to overlook sickness and even death
than to even consider that medicine may be good.

 

Folks, we can worship a culture of death. We can antagonize the idea of good, and deny the depravity of evil in our midst, in our own very hearts, because of our ignorance.

 

But there are lives in our hands.

 

People.

Friends. Family. Strangers. Self.

What are people in your life going through?
Will you fix them?
Will you embrace them in their sickness?

Or is there a third way?

 

Perhaps we’ve gotten in all wrong. Perhaps the medicine really is good. Maybe they were simply wielding it wrong, with fear, with a need to purify everything before they could love. And what love is that?

But perhaps sickness and death are still just as bad as ever…

And what if it is deadly not to acknowledge this?

 

To be loved
only after one is “fixed” and glued up like a lamp…
this is not a fate I would wish on anyone.

To be loved,
but broken forever…
“could it be worse?”

But to be loved,
to be loved and broken,
to be loved and,
finally,
to be loved and healed
for this we must strive.

 

 

by some life, you also have life.
by some authority, you also have authority.
there is love in your heart,
and there is healing in your hands.

wield it well —
and don’t you dare withhold it.