What Does God Do With My Brokenness?

Several years ago, I started a renovation project in our house. The design, function, and final look of the project have occupied space in my mind. It isn’t always there, but I always come back to it. I plan, scheme, and dream of what I want to do.

All these projects have a similar progression. There is the project's inception. The thought that births all the pain and frustration—spent dollars, and potential disagreements.

As I reflect on that time, I think about how my home DIY project, in some small, broken way, reflects what is happening within me.

While there is a risk here of getting mired in an endless morass of allegory and comparison. Achieving allegorical and theological perfection is not the end goal here. I just want to share how God has been showing me some things in the past few days about what he is doing in my life.

Everyone Is a Work in Progress

When we moved in, our master bathroom needed some work. Over time, I had planned on fixing it and had demoed items here and there. It was not fully functional.

The vanity and sink were gone; the bath was disconnected and flipped on its side; and the toilet worked only marginally (including a mysterious double flush). It has served as that dusty harbinger of materialism, the place where we put overabundance. It was broken and virtually unusable, but unmistakably a bathroom.

I am, so to speak, that bathroom. A spark of the divine, a remnant of a pre-fall Creation, like a memory right there on the edge of our conscious mind. We can’t quite grasp it. There is a distant memory of Eden, but it is broken, lost, and unusable.

Then Christ redeemed me. He breathed the divine into the broken body that was meant to mirror him and I became functional, though not complete.

Christ Has a Plan

Much like I have had a plan for my bathroom, Christ has had a plan for me. It is the image in Paradise Lost of Christ offering to step in and be sacrificed before the World is ever created. He is the sacrifice slain from the foundation of the world. His plan has always been in place, and he is remaking me.

I am Christ’s, and therefore I function as a Christian, and I am clothed in Christ. He has been the propitiation for my guilt. Like my bathroom, I am unmistakably a Christian, but not fully finished.

I am not perfected. I am broken, but I am being remade and renewed every day. He is excising the rotting boards and insulating the walls against the outside elements. He is upgrading the function, and out of that function comes beauty, as I began to resemble more and more of Christ. He is sanctifying me as I walk with him and daily surrender.

Always More Work to Be Done

Now, this thought did not come from me or from my own head. It was born out of an article I read years ago called "Attics and Temples" by the late Rich Mullins. In it, he writes these words I'll leave you with today:

“However messy it may be now, however confusing and scary it appears, however endless the task may seem, we will some day be glorious, beautiful, alive! There is much tearing out to do – a lot to give up. No thin coat of new paint, no shallow, petty piety will do. It’s not good enough to cover up imperfection, it must be corrected. Art, beauty, function – these things take time. They may take till the day of Christ Jesus.” – Rich Mullins