by Betsy Clark

Created on: February 20, 2009

It was a most unusual cross, a wooden cross, maybe two feet tall and it had pieces of broken mirror attached all over the front like a mosaic. Definitely not your ordinary cross you would expect to find in church, but not so out of place in the chapel of a distant satellite seminary campus housed in a converted medical building. I should have been paying more attention to whatever it was that was happening in class at the time but I couldn't stop looking at the cross. Then all of a sudden I had one of those "Oh wow!" moments. I thought, what a perfect metaphor that is for life, for my life or anybody's life who has stumbled or struggled, which is pretty much all of us at some level. It had begun as a broken mirror, apparently useless now for what it was intended to be, ready to be swept up and thrown away. But instead, someone had picked up the pieces and very carefully attached them to the cross. And now here was this completely new thing that was really quite beautiful and that reflected something that just compelled me to look at it.

In a lot of ways our lives are like mirrors we are concerned with what we see and what our friends and neighbors and co-workers see. It's all about what's on the surface but we don't often if ever let anyone see what's underneath. Much of the time we won't or can't even look beneath the surface ourselves. At some point in our lives though, if we are lucky, something happens to make us look. And it usually takes something big to make us look often something traumatic or devastating. And that's when we find that our life underneath has become like a pile of broken glass shattered and broken, with sharp edges so no one can touch. Our brokenness comes in many forms fears that we refuse to face, hurts that we won't let go of, envy, greed, criticism, lust, depression, self-doubt, self-pity, self-importance. Sometimes we get broken by events or circumstances, or by the cruelty or indifference of others, and sometimes we do it all by ourselves. The devil knows where our weak points are and that is where he goes to work until we end up broken... broken in spirit, broken-hearted, and with broken hopes and dreams. As long as we remain in a state of brokenness, we are unable to understand wholeness. It keeps us from hearing God telling us how much he loves us and how wonderful are the plans that he has for us. It keeps us from understanding God's call to live a life of love and service to our brothers and sisters. It keeps us from seeing

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