Being Broken

I wonder if you have ever known what it is to be broken?

Not sad. Everyone gets sad sometimes. Sad is a mood. Broken is a state of being. You don’t feel broken, you are broken. There is a way out of sad. There is no way out of broken.

Have you ever known that state? Have you ever been broken?

To be shattered, to be crushed, to be pounded to dust by the hammer blows of your own life when your own life turns on you and decides you are not worthy of it?

Do you know?

Do you know what it is to be so far from redemption that redemption itself seems disgusting to you? To be so broken that you don’t want to be fixed, because the only way to fix you would be to change you into something utterly different, and to be utterly different is just a different kind of broken?

Have you ever been that far away?

Have you ever crouched in darkness, and looked up, and seen nothing but more darkness, and prayed that the darkness would end, pleaded with the darkness to leave you, asked that the darkness come crashing down and smother you rather than make you spend another minute inside it, because the darkness is too dark and light has become an impossibility?

Do you know what it’s like to be in that darkness? Have you been broken?

Have you ever felt a wound so deep and so wide that it swallows you? Have you ever felt the blade in that wound, turning and turning and turning and never stopping and never…