My mastectomy was in May, and since then I’d been in a deep depression.  Instead of feeling better, I continued to feel worse – and December was the worst month yet.

My birthday was the second week of December, and my friends threw me a dinner party to celebrate. When they brought out the cake, I closed my eyes, leaned over the candles and made a wish. Actually, it was more like a prayer.  “Please, God, please don’t let this year be any worse than last year was. I can’t take any more.” 

 For months now I felt like someone very close to me had died, and no matter how honestly and deeply I grieved, the sadness wouldn’t lift.  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the darkness.  At the suggestion of my oncologist, I had joined an online breast cancer support group in the hopes of finding a community to encourage me while I recovered from the physical and emotional scars. I chatted with women who had walked this road, and I begged them to tell me what to do to get past this pain. 

One woman told me that she had been depressed after her mastectomy, too.  Her Kabbalah instructor told her to write an obituary to her breasts, and let them go.  After we’d chatted for a while, she wrote, “Honey, go write that obit and have a good cry.”

But in that moment, I wasn’t sad; I was mad. Write an obituary?  If I did that, the loss would be irrevocable. Say good-bye?  I had spent the past few months telling God how unacceptable this loss was, how He needed to appeal His decision and give me back my chest and my health and my life.  If I said good-bye, I would cement my loss, and God might think I was okay.

I was definitely not okay. I spent hours a day sitting on the couch in my studio apartment, staring at the sky while tears ran down my face. 

And so as I thought about my birthday wish, I told God He didn’t have to make my life better right away; I could probably survive as long as it didn’t get any worse.  I blew out the candle, but before I could open my eyes, people around the table started screaming and I smelled smoke. As I looked up to see what was happening, my boyfriend yelled, “Your hair’s on fire!”

He dumped water on his hand, then grabbed a fistful of my hair and squelched the flames.

As my nostrils filled with the stench of burnt hair and my friends scurried to clean up the mess, I wondered, “If your hair catches on fire while you’re making a wish, does that mean it isn’t coming true?”

(This is the first of seven vignettes…I’ll post a new one every day or two)

On Christmas Eve of 2006, I boarded a plane in Connecticut and flew home to Chicago.  My parents and siblings picked me up from the airport, and we drove to church for the Christmas Eve service.

I had always hoped I’d be like Mary – a young woman who loved God, whose life took an extraordinary turn.  My life had taken an extraordinary turn, but in the wrong direction. Instead of beating the odds to become pregnant with the Messiah, I’d beaten million-to-one odds and gotten breast cancer in my 20’s.  And God was nowhere to be found.

After the pageant, the ushers dimmed the lights and passed out small white candles.  As I held the flickering light in my hand, we began to sing Christmas carols a cappella.

Angels we have heard on high

Sweetly singing o’er the plains

And the mountains in reply

 Echoing their joyous strain

Gloria, in excelsis Deo!

In excelsis Deo.  I knew from my Sunday School days that the phrase was Latin for “God in the Highest.” It reminded me of another Latin phrase, in extremis.  This was a phrase I had learned in my medical training that described a patient who was struggling to breathe as they died. In extremis is translated as, “in the farthest reaches” or “at the point of death.”

As I listened to people around me singing carols, I thought, “God, don’t want you to be in the highest; I need you to be with me now in the lowest.”

That’s where I felt that Christmas: In the lowest depths.  In the farthest reaches.  At the point of death.

*

When I was in college, I had a good friend who was a few years older than me who was in police academy.  He was struggling, and even though I was in school 3,000 miles away, I tried to encourage him from a distance.

When he told me that he had to do ten push-ups for every piece of mail he received, I had a brilliant idea.  I had all the girls on my wing of the dorm (24 in total) to each write him a letter.  When we finished the notes, we put them in individual envelopes, then applied red lipstick and put kisses all over the envelopes.

When he got the letters, not only did he have to do 240 push-ups, he also had to put up with the ribbing from his drill sargeant and comrades.  But it he’ll never forget it. (They wouldn’t let him if he tried.)

I was talking to him the other day, and he told me that he still keeps a poem I sent him in his Bible. I couldn’t remember what I’d sent him, so he began reading it to me…

“O Long and dark the stairs I trod with trembling feet to find my God

Gaining a foothold, bit by bit, then slipping back and losing it.

Never progressing, striving still with weakening grasp and faltering will.

Bleeding to climb to God, while He serenely smiled, not noting me.

Then came a certain time when I  loosened my hold and fell thereby.

Down to the lowest step my fall, as if I had not climbed at all.

Now when I lay despairing there – Listen, a footfall on the stair

On that same stair where I afraid, faltered and fell and lay dismayed.

And lo, when hope had ceased to be, my God came down the stairs to me!”

(an anonymous poem from John MacArthur’s commentary on Romans)

And I thought about how precious it was that he was encouraging me with the same poem I’d sent to encourage him more than a decade ago.  Sometimes that’s the best thing a friend can do for you – remind you to remember.

Last night the air in Portland was crisp and cool, and this morning it rained.  As I was sloshing to work in the rain, I realized that summer is almost over, which means that school is just about to begin.  Which means, of course, that back to school shopping is in full swing.

I have never been a fan of back to school shopping.  I have always thought of it as one of those contrived holidays meant to entice shoppers to flock to stores to spend their money on things they don’t need.  Like shady salesmen who exhort you to celebrate President’s Day by buying a new king-sized mattress.  It just hits me wrong.

Most shopping hits me wrong these days, actually.  The emphasis on quantity rather than quality, the constant message that there’s something better than what you have, the idea that this purse or these shoes or this cologne is the missing piece that will make you feel complete…it’s all very depressing.

I’ve been doing some thinking and reading and praying about consumerism lately.  As part of this self-imposed research project, I watched a documentary called “What Would Jesus Buy?”  It was produced by Morgan Spurlock, the guy who starred in “Supersize Me.”   

“What Would Jesus Buy” was another, cheesier way of asking the questions I was wondering:  What should my response be to consumerism?  Where is my treasure?  Where is my heart? 

I bribed one of my friends with ice cream, and he agreed to watch the movie with me.   The movie featured a man named Reverend Billy, who looks a lot like a blonde Elvis impersonator, and his back-up singers called the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Reverend Billy and his choir toured the U.S. in a charter bus, stopping to proclaim on street corners and in churches that America should stop shopping so much.

If you think this sounds like the plot of a good movie, you’d be wrong.  At one point, The Rev tries to get an audience at Wal-Mart’s headquarters, but the security guards won’t let him in.  So in a fit of passion, he does a spread eagle onto the shrubs in front of the Wal-Mart sign.  Nothing gets executives to think seriously about the implications of their business decisions like a lunatic jumping into their bushes.

So anyway, about half way through the movie I decided I would rather poke my eye out with a stick than keep watching it.  I was about to turn it off when the producers turned the cameras off of The Rev and his antics, and onto a man who was an advocate for employees of overseas manufacturing companies.

The man was standing in his office with his arm around a slight adolescent Asian girl who, when asked what her life was like, looked blankly into the camera and replied through the translator, “I feel like I’m dying.”

I feel like I’m dying. 

I looked at the clothes I was wearing, the furniture I was sitting on, the dishes I was eating from.  Was it possible that my purchases had contributed to the outsourcing of labor to Asian children who felt like they were dying? 

If money talks, what was mine saying?  That instead getting an education that would enable them to improve their earning potential and their quality of life, these children should be earning pennies a day in sweat shops so I can have my clothes a little cheaper?

Of course, this is a bigger problem than you or I can solve on our own.  But maybe we could start with changing the way we approach clothes shopping this fall.

American kids aren’t the only ones who should be getting back to school.

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend, and afterwards we walked across the street to my favorite coffee shop.  While we waited for the barrista to make his mocha and my chai, I browsed the community bulletin board.

A flyer caught my eye.  It said, “Fundraiser Cut-A-Thon May 2nd.”   It offered haircuts at a local salon for a suggested donation of $7.00  At the bottom it said, “All proceeds will go to a cosmetology student that is batling cancer.” 

I took a flyer and showed it to my friend.  “I should do this,” I said.

“But what about your chemo curls?  They’re great!”  he said.  “Maybe you could just give a donation and skip the haircut.”

I nodded, and stuck the paper in my purse and moved on.  He was probably right.  I shouldn’t go through with it.  I couldn’t go through with it.  Could I?

After losing my hair to chemo two years ago, I am extremely attached to my hair now.  My curls are sometimes unruly and uncooperative, but I love them.  I really do.  They are my equivalent of a red badge of courage.  They are at once a symbol of my loss as well as my reward for surviving arduous months of cancer treatment.

My friend Lauren had chemo for lung cancer, and when her hair started to grow back, she let it grow.  And grow.  And grow.  Her curls were unruly, too, but she wouldn’t let anyone with scissors near her head.  “I worked too hard for these,” she used to say.  “I’m not cutting a single inch.”

That’s the stand I took, too.  Until this morning, when I studied the flyer while I was drinking my coffee. 

Could I do it?  Could I part with these curls that have taken blood, toil, sweat and tears – and 24 months of my life – to grow? 

I thought about what my friend said, that I could just give money and not get my hair cut.  But I realized that giving money wouldn’t be any sacrifice.  It wouldn’t cost me nearly as much as a hair cut would. 

David’s words when he was offering an expensive sacrifice to God echoed in my mind, “I will not give that which costs me nothing.”  (my paraphrase)

So I drove to the salon in downtown Gresham, handed over my contribution to the fundraiser, sat down in a barber’s chair, and I let the stylist cut my precious curls.

While she was cutting, I thought about the last time I was in a hair salon, getting my hair cut.  It was two years ago, April 2007.  When I fould out I was going to be having chemo, I decided to get my long blonde hair cut preemptively so I could donate it to Locks of Love.  If I couldn’t have long hair, at least some child going through chemo could have a wig of beautiful blonde hair.

Three of my friends showed up at the salon to lend moral support.  I teared up as they were taking pictures of me pre-haircut, with my long blonde hair still attached. 

One of my friends slipped out, went to a wine shop next door, and bought a bottle of champagne.  She returned with the bottle and four plastic glasses.  We popped the cork and had a toast.  To my hair, I said.  What I really meant was, Here’s goodbye to the life I used to love.  Remember this moment, in case I don’t ever get it back.

To your hair, they said as we charged our glasses.  Cheers.

Three glasses of champagne later, my long hair was gone.  Staring back at me in the mirror was an androgenous face with hair cropped short like a 12-year-old boy, I thought.  I laughed and cried at the same time.  It was too profound a loss to be controlled by any single emotion.

While I was getting my hair cut today, the cosmetology student with cancer came in.  Her tall, thin, beautiful, 19-year-old frame was folded into a wheelchair.  She was wearing latex gloves and a surgical mask.  She’s going through chemo for liver cancer, but she hasn’t lost her hair yet.  It’s long and straight and blonde.  Like mine used to be. 

I smiled at her when her mom wheeled her into the salon.  “I’m Sarah,” I said.  “I had cancer two years ago, and I survived.” 

I recognized the vacant, exhausted, going-through-cancer-treatment look in her eyes. 

And then, for a few fleeting seconds, I saw them brighten with an expression that was more precious than any amount of money, more valuable than all my hard-earned chemo curls. 

It was a glimmer that looked for all the world like hope.

I was reading an article on singleness that was reprinted from Glamour magazine when I came across this priceless quote.

“But hey, there are far worse things than not knowing your romantic future. Imagine being diagnosed with breast cancer, treating it, and beating it … but still wondering at every next mammogram if the cancer will have come back. That’s living with uncertainty.”

You’ve GOT to be kidding me.

The book of Ecclesiastes, which was written thousands of years ago, says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

You’d think after that wise insight had been taught to hundreds and hundreds of generations, it would eventually sink in.  But it hasn’t.  Not with me, at least.  I thought the recent lessons I’ve been learning about being rather than doing for God was an epiphany unique to me. 

I was humbled to read the following passage written by C.S. Lewis more than 50 years ago. 

     “What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction…This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies.  It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do.  Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. 

     But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.”

                                                                                                                          - C.S. Lewis, Christian Behavior

The other day I was driving on the freeway at 60 mph when I heard a loud bang, and my car began to shudder and decelerate.  I tried to drive to the next exit, but my car was shaking too hard to drive it.  So I pulled over to the side of the road and called a tow truck. 

While I waited, I tried to figure out what could be wrong with my car.  I had plenty of gas, and I’d recently had the oil changed, so those didn’t seem likely culprits.  My Saturn is 11 years old, so it’s not inconceivable that something major, like the transmission, had gone out. 

I thought about popping the hood and taking a look at the engine, but that didn’t seem like a good idea – partly because I was on the shoulder of a major highway with less than 6 inches between me and speeding traffic, and partly because I know absolutely nothing about engines. If I did look under the hood, it would just be for form’s sake, not because I could actually recognize or fix any problems.

When the tow truck arrived, the mechanic helped me out the passenger’s side and over the concrete divider where I could watch him work from a safe distance.  As soon as I looked back at the car, I immediately saw the problem: my rear tire had blown out.  It was flatter than flat, with shards of rubber hanging from the rim. 

The mechanic hooked my car up to his truck, and towed it off the closest exit.  He drove into an abandoned lot, changed my tire, and handed me back my key.  “You’re really lucky it was your back tire that blew out, not your front tire,” he told me.  “When the front tire blows out, most people lose control of their car.” 

I thought about losing control of my little 2 door coupe in rush hour traffic, and shuddered.  I thanked him profusely and, without thinking about it, threw my arms around him and hugged him before I climbed into my car.  (I’m pretty sure he didn’t see that coming).

He waved at me as I drove away.  I made it to my dinner date, only 10 minutes late in spite of the misadventure. 

And I didn’t think much of it after that. 

I didn’t raise my fist to heaven and ask, “Why, God, Why?  Why would my back tire blow out instead of my front tire?  Why didn’t I wreck my car?  Why wasn’t I seriously injured?  Just tell me why!”

That would have been ridiculous, right?  But it is a fair question.  With a 50/50 chance of back vs. front tire blow out, why did the odds fall to the safer of the two options, the one that didn’t get me killed in a fiery wreck?

Because, while I intellectually recognize the equal potential for good and bad in most situations, I instinctively want and expect the good things to happen to me.  Bad things are what happen to other people.

A surgeon who lectured to my class in grad school gave an insightful answer to the question of the difference between major and minor surgery.  “Minor surgery is the one you’re not having,” he said.

I think that egocentric perspective is part of being human.  I certainly recognize it in myself.  I am not nearly as surprised that young women get breast cancer as I was that I got it.

I work in an ER and it does not shock me to see sick people, but it sure throws me for a loop when I get sick.

I am quick to complain when I get the short end of the stick, but think nothing of it when things unexpectedly go my way. 

My parents are happily married and I didn’t have to grow up in a broken home. 

I got to go to college and even grad school. 

I have an interesting job and great friends. 

I love the church I go to. 

I’ve been snorkeling in Mexico, Bermuda and Hawaii. 

We often ask why bad things happen, but maybe that’s the wrong question.  When we live in a world where entropy and the second law of thermodynamics are in effect, and everything seems to be in a process of disorganization and decay, maybe the real question is…why do good things happen to bad people?  Why do good things happen to me?

The piano piece 4′33″ (Pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”) was first performed at a piano recital in Woodstock, NY, in 1952. 

Pianist David Tudor took the stage and performed the piece composed by John Cage.  Tudor sat down at the piano…in complete silence.  For four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

The piece is actually composed of three movements.  Tudor opened and closed the keyboard lid to signify the end of a movement and the beginning of the next.  By the time he closed the lid for the final time, many people in the audience had left – some were confused by the silence; others were enraged.

Cage’s point was that even what we consider silence, the absence of intentional sound, is composed of lots of incidental sounds that we notice only when we stop to be quiet and listen. 

I haven’t posted anything on my blog in a few months, because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’ve been trying to do a lot of listening.  It’s not easy for me.  I’d rather be busy and verbose than still and silent. Silence takes discipline.  Silence is awkward.  Silence requires more being than doing.  And, as Shakespeare would say, there’s the rub.

I am the A-est of Type A personalities.  When I was twelve, I started going to informational meetings offered by medical schools so I could carefully research my educational options.   When I was fourteen, my dad found me sitting on the porch steps one evening, watching the sun go down.  He asked what I was thinking about, and  I told him I was thinking about running for president – and I wasn’t kidding.

When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked why they should accept me into the program.  I told them, because I was going to change the world, and they would have the chance to say they knew me when.

Then I finished Yale and got accepted into Columbia, and I thought, I knew it!  I knew I was supposed to do something big!

My favorite motto was, “Attempt great things for God.”  Not only was I attempting great things; I was succeeding at them. 

I suppose I should have known that it wouldn’t last forever, but I didn’t.  My mom told me, God made us human beings, not human do-ers. But it didn’t sink in.

Until I got sick and I lost everything I cared about, every opportunity I’d been working so hard to create.  I left my job at Yale, left the journalism program at Columbia, and moved 3,000 miles away.  I wasn’t trying to do anything noble; I was just trying not to let my sadness drive me insane.

I used to have an impressive list of degrees and accomplishments.  For the past year, my big accomplishments have included getting out of bed in the mornings, making myself nutritious food, not getting chemo, managing my crazy curly hair, and staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what’s next.

I’ve been plotting all the cool things I could do for God in Portland, telling Him what I think the new plan should be. As if I’ve been red shirted, and I’m waiting for the coach to look down the bench, point his finger at me, and sub me back into the game to score the game-winning shot.

But instead of cosmic enthusiasm, I have been met with silence.  And reminders that I am a human being, not a human do-er. 

I was thinking about this the other day when I was reading Luke 18.  The rich young ruler asks Jesus what he’s supposed to do to become a follower of Christ.  He tells Jesus he’s already kept the 10 Commandments, and asks what’s next.  Jesus tells him to go sell everything he had, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow Him.

The rich young man went away sad, because he was wealthy and didn’t want to sacrifice that much to follow Jesus.  And that’s how the Sunday School version of the story usually ends.

But if you read a little further, you see Peter telling Jesus, “We have left everything to follow you!”  I think he and the other disciples saw Jesus’ interaction with the rich young man.  And they realized that while the young man didn’t have the chutzpah to make the sacrifice, Peter and John and the rest of the disciples had done just that!  When Jesus called them, they had dropped their nets, abandoned their boats, resigned their places on the fishing committees, and followed Jesus.

When I see Peter’s statement, I imagine he meant, “Jesus, you know how you said to that guy that to please you he just had to sell everything and follow you?  Well, that’s exactly what we did.  Remember that?  Remember how we gave up everything you asked us to?  We sacrificed everything we had to become your disciples, and we still don’t get you.  We still don’t understand what you’re talking about.  We still don’t understand you.”

The disciples, and many saints who have come after them, learned that what seemed to be the finish line was really the starting gate.  Abandoning everything to follow Jesus wasn’t the goal; it was just the qualification for the next round. You don’t get the prize; you get the chance to contend for the prize.

What exactly are we contending for?  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  What’s the goal? What’s the point? 

The best answer I can find is simply that we get the chance to know God, and to be known by Him.  Which is weird and strangely unsatisfying, because personally I’d rather get the chance to do something hard for God.  Like be a martyr.  Or live on the streets with homeless people.  Or run a non-profit organization.  Or adopt orphans from Darfur.  Or buy children out of the sex trade.  Because at least when you do something hard, you have something to show for your troubles.

What does it matter if you know someone?  That’s not a normal goal for an A-est of Type A personalities kind of person. But I think it’s true nonetheless. 

Jeremiah wrote, “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me…” (Jeremiah 9:23,24, emphasis added.)

So I sit at the keyboard, long after the spotlight has dimmed and the audience has gone home, with my empty hands poised above the keys, trying to interpret God’s silence, and praying that He’ll interpret mine.

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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