My recent experience of a broken wrist has taught me some valuable lessons about brokenness. Most of all, God wanted me to remember His loving desire to heal and restore what’s broken and wounded. He proactively provided for that by creating our bodies with an amazing ability to heal! The more I learn about how broken bones heal, the more amazed I am by the way our Creator God designed our bodies to form new bone tissue to bridge the gap in a broken bone until it returns to the same strength as before! And just as He heals what’s physically broken, He also desires to heal our invisible emotional brokenness hidden deep inside our souls. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3) He is indeed Jehovah Rapha, “The Lord Who Heals” physical and emotional wounds.
Another timely truth I needed to be reminded of was God’s patience and compassion during the healing process. There were times when I felt frustrated and restricted by the cast. It limited my movements and prevented me from doing normal activities like driving. My immobilized left hand literally became a burden to the rest of my body which had to support the weight of the cast and compensate for its inability to do its part. In my impatience and haste to resume physical play with the grandkids, I displaced my wrist bone in the cast and immediately felt a sharp pain. This meant I needed a new cast after an excruciatingly painful adjustment to realign my broken bone again. Discouraged from the pain and setback, I received wholeheartedly from Donna Parachin the very words I needed to hear: “You must be very careful and love your wrist back to wholeness.” That totally changed my attitude from seeing my broken wrist as a burden, incapable of functioning, to a precious hurting part of my body that deserved to be loved back to wholeness. Wow! I thought of the broken in the Body of Christ, especially those who are out of commission because they’ve been wounded so badly. I echo Ryan’s prayer in his April 1 devotion: “My prayer is that we as a church would grow in compassion toward those who are hurting and broken, and respond with grace and compassion instead of judgment or offence.” May we grow in empathy and reflect the heart and character of God who is “close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18)
Loving my wrist back to wholeness also meant I needed to do my part to cooperate with God’s heart and power to heal. I needed to invest time, effort and money in its healing. My wrist deserved it! So I persevered through painful physiotherapy sessions and prescribed exercises which gradually restored strength, mobility and function in my left hand. How thankful I was to be able to drive again! By contrast, someone I know who similarly broke her wrist had a very different outcome without timely medical intervention and physiotherapy. Her wrist did not heal properly as her broken bone was not realigned, and her strength was not fully restored. She may have escaped the pain of bone adjustment and physiotherapy but she regrets that her wrist remains weak and misaligned. Similarly in our journey of healing from emotional wounds, we need to make every effort to invest in our healing so that we don’t remain stuck in a state of brokenness, bitterness or bondage. It will cost us time, effort and sometimes money to invest in our emotional health, but our souls deserve it. The healing process often involves pain, a good and necessary pain that results in a stronger, healthier version of ourselves that’s more whole and free. Free to love God. Free to love others. The scars that remain without pain become a testimony of God’s love and healing grace in our lives.
A beautiful illustration of this is “Kintsugi” (meaning golden joinery), the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with joinings of gold. It produces pieces of art with “golden scars” that are more beautiful than the original, having been broken and mended. May we embrace our brokenness, flaws and imperfections with humility but without shame, as we place our lives in the loving hands of Jehovah Rapha. And may we also be willing to do the hard and painful work required in our healing while we cooperate with His heart and power to heal. We can depend on Him for the grace we need to do what’s hard and painful. We can trust Him to make “everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and become the very vessels who reflect the beauty and character of Jesus, our Master Potter, set free and strengthened to love and do good works which He prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)