The Reason Broken=Beautiful

This is an excerpt from my memoir Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome, which debuts 8/18/15. Download four free chapters from Howard Books–Simon & Schuster HERE.

I closed my eyes and considered what brokenness means.

Being broken is destruction—yes, it’s pain and filth and ugliness and wondering how you’ll ever breathe—or believe—again. But a break is also an opportunity, a crack opening worlds of possibility that don’t exist when everything is intact. If a break can turn into something beautiful—and it can, because a breakthrough necessitates first a crack and then a chasm—isn’t being broken, turned on the axis of perception, beautiful too?

I imagined myself during the Breaking, losing more of my faith with every tear. I thought of that broken girl, the girl I was no longer, and knew it was from her ashes that a new faith was able to arise, one stronger and more real than before. This faith was unshakable and unstoppable because it was mine alone.

Even though I was sleeping instead of celebrating, I knew this was a true victory—because life’s real victories happen far from trophies. They happen in the space between heartbeats.

Life’s real victories happen when we embrace forgiveness, when we set aside hate in favor of love, when we choose to look for God even if it hurts. They happen when we are lying in bed, crying our eyes out, and we choose to hold on to a bare sliver of hope that almost seems a delusion. They happen when illness pulls at the corners of our sneakers, knocking us down, and faith pulls us back up. And they happen on the floor of our closet, in the moment that looks and feels like broken defeat, when we are in pain and exhausted and seeking, hardly daring to believe.

It is in that moment that light surprises us by overtaking darkness, shining in its glory, showing us something more beautiful than we had dared to dream.

This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you are to whom you will become. Being broken means healing can find you and hope can gush forth like a geyser, flooding every part of you, until you can see what the Breaking did in the first place: it give birth to you.

So I rested my healed spirit and broken body in this deep pool of hope, choosing to be thankful for both what I had and what I lacked.

Because real victories?

Real victories happen in weakness, where strength is closer than our very next breath.