Battled & Broken

The summer I was four, my mother was pregnant with my little brother. Complications landed her on bedrest and I went for an extended stay with my great-grandparents. They lived on a Missouri farm in the absolute middle of nowhere. Their farmhouse sat on a huge yard, back off the gravel road. There was a red barn behind it, with stray kittens drinking milk out of a bowl on the back porch and a Buick sedan and old farm truck lining the driveway. 

My Grandpa Scott drank the orange-powdered breakfast drink Tang every morning, called me “Cheater”, and offered an entire package of Juicy Fruit to every kid he met. My Grandma played the piano at their church down the road and spent her free time sewing and crocheting the most beautiful things I have ever seen. 

I adored them both.

One day we were all riding in the truck on a hot July afternoon. The windows were down and dusty air blew in to cool us off as I started to drift off with my head on the seat between them. But before I was sound asleep, I heard my grandpa say, “Thank goodness she fell asleep. Her mouth hasn’t stopped running since she got here.”

Even at four years old, I was crushed. Some 40-plus years later, I still fear being that person who speaks more than she should and doesn’t have the good sense to know it.

Although I’ve long been aware that God wired me to connect with people through speaking and writing, I am just now able to move past my 4-year-old self and see this as a blessing and an opportunity.

It was during my son’s bout with cancer that God showed how He planned to use these things for His glory. I started blogging and posting, simply to keep our supporters up to date on Matt’s progress. It wasn’t my first writing for public consumption. I was a journalist early in my career and continued to write here and there. But this was the first time people interacted with my writing in a way that made me realize that there was something about transparently sharing my struggles that resonated with others. People saw themselves in my struggle and weakness.

Then I was asked to speak about God’s faithfulness at a women’s conference. Then to another group, and another. And before I knew it, it became clear that God would use Matt’s illness for His glory and for our good (Romans 8:28).

But what about the other struggles; the abandonment, the abuse, the shame, the perfectionism, the self-hatred and exhausting efforts to fool people into thinking I was ok when I was anything but. God wants to use it all? In fact, He wants to use it to connect to you, because my guess is that some of my struggles are yours as well. 

I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a heart for us all to leave behind these thoughts of not being enough; not smart enough, not wealthy enough, not pretty enough, not athletic enough, not artistic enough, not disciplined enough, not loved enough. 

My promise to you is to be real. My prayer for you is to join me as we learn to embrace our brokenness and discover our true value and identity is in the finished work of a Jesus, who loves us passionately and completely. 

Comment something positive as we “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” Hebrews 12:2