Heartbreak

Two weeks ago, I stood during sharing time at church and choked out some words. A warm motley crew filled the small wooden structure - a people so honest that my brokenness was not out of place. As Foster expresses in his book Celebrations, we learn and live "the necessity of bringing spiritual realities into the press of raw humanity."

I told them my father is going to prison. And I am heart-broken.

Afterwards, a friend approached me about lunch. I talk regularly with her but always within the pew. In my desperation, I was bolder than normal. We agreed to meet for lunch during the week.

Sitting in a wooden booth between slices of sandwich, we traced our lives discovering arcs so similar as to leave us in astonishment. Two hours of conversation about pain and numbness, lost childhoods, anger and fear, running (always running) and questions about the reality of Jesus.

Our words curved through time, to past and present and past again, and somehow truth about who God is and the way things are on earth came flowing. Truth heals and it startled me to realize if I was silent, she may not have heard about a God that always runs after us; a God who always ran after me, one whose life is so parallel to her own.

People struggle with sin and it breaks them just as it breaks us. But praise be to Christ that our brokenness can be someone else's healing. 

Revelation 1:5 "To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood." And the sins of our fathers.