Do you ever feel as if your heart and life have been broken open? You feel tattered, torn, beaten and bruised. The feeling is familiar, you’ve been here before and yet it’s also new because this is the first time you’ve stood here, now in this place, in this brokenness.

Broken open – my friend offered me these words the other day and they came as a gift, they fit into me in that moment as if they were always there waiting for me to reach them in this here and now place.

Broken open is a rending, a ripping, a tearing, a pulling apart. These two words don’t convey neat, contained, controlled or elegant. They are paint splashed on canvas, a jarring symphony, they are tears, snot, anger and pain.

And yet… they also come as comfort, a release, a breaking open so that what is within can pour out – unhindered honesty, raw grief, a vulenrable realness. They reveal and expose, shining a light on what was hiding. Being broken open invites us to something new, a new way of being, new healing and freedom. The openness also creates a way for us to receive what God is offering. In this place we are an open vessel that can be poured into. In a place of weakness we are invited to offer our authenitc selves and be given what we need.

Don’t be too quick to seal this breaking in order to escape the pain that comes with it. With this breaking is an opening. A beautiful, wide opening that is full of offering. If we walk into it, if we sit here in the ‘broken-open’, right in the middle of this gaping wound we will be changed and we will heal even if the healing leaves us scarred. Love, grace, comfort and freedom live in these open places. It’s when we close or cover the opening by our own means that those things disappear. We are invited to rest awhile in this open, vulnerable, scary place and trust that in time Trinity love will gently pour into and heal the broken open place and take us to somewhere new.

Being broken open is not easy but it is covered in possibility and within its shattered fragments lies great hope.