The ideas of unity and brokenness have both been on my mind lately. Mostly because small group kickoff was about brokenness and Resonate was about being one. (If you aren't a Lee student and have no idea what I am talking about, message me. I'll fill you in.) These two things are so contradictory to one another. Unity means being one and being one means being whole. This is the complete opposite of brokenness because when you are broken, you're, well, broken. You're not whole. You're not put together. The longer I dwell on these ideas though, the more I realize they aren't as opposite as one would think.
Let's just take our culture for an example right now. When we look at other people, or see other people's posts on social media, we perceive them as being whole. We compare our lives to other people's lives because we automatically think that we are the only broken person in the world. This idea is completely untrue. Every single person that walks the face of this planet is broken. We are all broken in different ways, but we don't take time to recognize other people's brokenness, much less be transparent enough to show our own brokenness. What if we did though? What if instead of having that cliche "hey. how are you? I'm good." conversation, we actually built relationships? Shared our struggles? Shared our pain? Lifted others up when they are broken down? What would the body of Christ look like and outside of that, what would society look like as a whole?
This is when I thought of finding unity even in our brokenness. I started thinking of a stain glass window. A stain glass window is perceived as one of the most beautiful parts of a building. Whenever a building has one, it's what its known for. "Which building is *insert name of building*?" "Oh. It's the building with the stain glass window." The funny thing is though, a stain glass window is just a bunch of different pieces of broken glass put together. It is different colors, different jagged edges, different degrees of brokenness being seen as beautiful. It is being seen as whole and as one. That's how we should be. We should be binding together with other broken people to lift each other up, to help lift other broken people up, so we can be one through the love of Jesus that has made our collective brokenness whole. So, do you want to be whole, or do you want to be a piece of broken glass?
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