broken

When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers told my class a story about a violin. 

She said that in a town in Austria, there was a violin maker who prided himself in making the finest-quality instruments. 

A first chair violinist came in one day and bought one of the violins.  However, it did not play up to the musician’s standards, and a few days later, the musician angrily returned to the instrument shop.  In a fit of rage, he smashed the violin against the floor and stormed out.

A few days later, the musician thought better of his actions and returned to the shop to apologize to its owner.  As the musician approached the shop, he heard the sweetest strains of music he’d ever heard coming from the shop’s open windows.  He walked in quietly to see the instrument maker standing in the middle of the store, passionately playing a violin.

“How much?” the musician asked the instrument maker.

“How much for what?”  the instrument maker asked, interrupting his playing.

“For that glorious violin!”  the musican exclaimed.  “I have never heard such an extraordinary instrument before!  I must have it!” 

“This, sir, is the instrument you returned to me three days ago, and it is not for sale,” the instrument maker informed him.

As the musician looked closely, he could see the cracks in the wood where the instrument maker had painstakingly glued the violin back together.  The broken instrument had been restored, and in spite of – or perhaps because of – its brokenness, it played a more extraordinary song than ever before.

I thought about brokenness a lot last year when I was going through treatment.  I was as sick and as sad and as scared as I’d ever been, and my only consolation was that many saints before me had had similar experiences, and God had seen them through. 

The Weeping Prophet wrote in Lamentations 3, “I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is.  So I say, ‘My splendor is gone, and all that I had hoped from the Lord.’” 

Paul wrote in II Corinthians 4, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” 

Surely it was great trials that had prompted these words, and yet the very fact that these verses are recorded in Scripture means that their authors survived to write them.

My other hope in those dark days was that the state I was in was not permanent.  My body would heal, my tears would dry, my immune system would rebuild, my hair would grow back, my chest would be reconstructed.  I just had to “keep the faith,” as my mom often reminded me, until it happened.

More than a year later, I can tell you that thanks be to God, my body has healed, my immune system is back to normal, I’ve undergone the final step of reconstruction, and my hair is curly and getting longer every day.

But I can’t say that my tears have dried.  I am a lot more weepy than I used to be.  In fact, last fall I purposefully stayed away from church because I realized that every time I went to church, I broke down in sobs when they sang the hymns.  Refrains like, “All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give,” and “The Love of God is greater far than tongue or tribe could ever tell; It goes beyond the farthest star and reaches to the deepest hell” reduced me to tears. 

Because for me, they weren’t just rhyming lines in a song; they were words wrenched from my soul, words that I knew were true only because I had gone to what felt like the deepest hell…and been carried out to safety in my loving Father’s arms.

So I stayed away for a few months.  When I moved to Portland, I thought I was over it.  I thought I could go to church again without dissolving into a puddle every time we sang a song.  My first Sunday at the new church, the children’s choir filed up onto the stage and began to sing, “Jesus loves me this I know…Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong.”  I lost it.  To my dismay, my weepiness had followed me to Oregon.

Now, instead of letting the tears keep me away from church, I just put extra tissues in my pocket on Sunday mornings because I know I’ll need them. 

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago while I was driving to church, and this verse came to me.  It’s the verse before Paul talks about being hard pressed, crushed, persecuted, etc. 

It says, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (II Cor. 4:7)

I thought all the way back to June of 2007 when I started this blog.  I had finished my first round of chemo, and I became so emotionally unstable that I decided to take an anti-depressant for a while because, as I said then, I didn’t want to end up a “cancer-free crack pot.”

The other thing that came to mind was something my best friend said to me last month when we got together for coffee.  She said, “What I love about you, Sarah, is your honesty and your brokenness.”  Her words jolted me.  I always thought of my brokenness as a temporary condition –something I had been but was recovered from because I was healthy — not a permanent state.  But she had said, What I love about you IS, not WAS.  Is.  As in, present tense.  Ongoing.  Still broken. 

As I drove to church with my pocket full of tissues, all of these pieces fit together, and I realized that I am the jar of clay that Paul wrote about.  I am a broken, cracked clay pot that God has chosen for some inexplicable reason to fill with His strength and His love and His joy. 

I am the violin that was shattered and repaired, that sings a more poignant song than ever before because it was restored by its Maker.

And the tears I cry so often during worship, they’re just drops of overwhelming gratitude and joy that spill through the myriad cracks. 

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