3rd July – Emma H
We have all seen pure brokenness amongst us over the last few months, from friends and families who have lost their jobs to whole cities coming to a halt and gut wrenching cries of enough is enough from BIPOC communities.
I remember a few months after little A came into our care, I was holding her in the early hours of the morning and I began to cry. I sobbed as tears rolled from my eyes. I looked at her, thinking and whispering, why?
Why does it have to be like this?
Why do I have to worry about what the earth will look like for your future?
Why does it still cross my mind how will you be accepted at school in just a few years?
In a perfect world, there would not have ever been the need for us to be your parents, but its not a perfect world.
The tears kept flowing that night and my heart was heavy. I was feeling the weight of this little life, and the responsibility it holds. And the weight of the world in which we are living in. I wanted to wrap her up in bubble wrap and never let her see the darkness of this world.
There will always be heartache and deep struggles. But it feels there will always be a minority community that needs us to stand side by side with them. Fighting the good fight, we will be fighting for the health of our world each and every single day.
What I felt God showing me as I heaved those sobs that night is that amongst the brokenness and the heartache, there is a synergy of love, a dancing joy and a calmness of peace. My love won’t erase, wipe out or sweep away all of the hurts that are coming little A’s way, but what it can do is help to weave the story of her life into an elegant and delicate tapestry. This is how I see the restoration of God. A quiet weaving of ordinary, mundane stories into the great tapestry of setting the world to right. We may not feel that we can ever do enough to fix the brokenness. We may think that it’s just too big, but that night I began to understand that restoration occurs between and within us. That is where God is at work.
As Richard Rohr so clearly articulates:
“One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.”
– Emma H
