Brokeness

I've recently been paying more attention to the things we do and the ways we behave. I was drifting off the sleep the other day (yes, a very RARE daytime nap), and all of these thoughts about human behavior and our inherent brokeness came into very sharp focus. Of course, I was nearly asleep and not about to get up and write all of these monumental discoveries down, but I did make a somewhat sleepy mental note to remember all this and write it down sometime in the future.

Needless to say, my thoughts when I tried to retrieve them post-slumber were a little foggy. But I think I have gathered them all back and tamed them down into some semi-coherent statement about broken people and broken behavior.

See, we are all broken. We are all born deficient in some way. It's easy to look at the impoverished, sick, and neglected and say that they are broken. But the most beautiful, the smartest, the most talented, the most charming, and the most anything among us, well they are broken too. We must sense this brokeness somehow, even if we don't communicate it out loud. I say we sense it, because we spend a lot of time, money and effort to fix ourselves.

Deep down inside, we seem to know that we need to feel valuable. Like we matter, like we count. And we go about finding our "niche" and trying to feel accepted. Guys play sports, conquer video games, hunt, etc. Girls spend tons on makeup, hair products, etc. Of course these are generalities, but think about it. If we didn't somehow sense our defiencies, why would we strive for something more...why would we strive for improvement? or victory? Unfortunately, for a lot of people the desire to be "fixed" leads to real problems. Like the girl who gives herself away to any and all guys who ask for it, and the heroin addict, the athlete so consumed with winning that he compromises his health with steroids, the gamer who has no social skills and lives 24/7 in a virtual world, the woman addicted to plastic surgery, the man addicted to porn. The list is endless...the ways we try so desparately to fix ourselves.

I challenge you to look around and see if you think I'm right. It seems like a desparate thing. And it is a desparate thing. Our brokeness won't leave us alone and we can't seem to ignore it.

We all strive to be and do something more because we need a real sense of life. Abundant life.

There is an answer to our brokeness.