Spirit & Body

I have more than my fair share of Christmas ornaments. I’ve also had a few mishaps with them.

The wings on the ceramic angel Love fell off. An ornament that contained a Christmas tree lost its Christmas tree. My favorite crystal star slipped off a limb and shattered. These broken ornaments accumulated during a time when I was broken. Years later, I finally picked up the pieces and fixed what I could. Nothing a bit of glue couldn’t handle.

If only life could be that easy for us. For all the joy Christmas brings, it can also magnify our losses. Death, financial struggles, and strained relationships can leave us feeling broken. Yet God offers hope and healing.

Christ was born to deliver us from our brokenness. We can overcome it. Painful situations may break us, yet God does not design us to stay broken. Jesus was merciful to people—lepers, the blind, the disabled, and even one notorious woman at the well. Christ offers the healing and redemption we desperately need. We celebrate the baby’s birth, yet the man who gave Himself to be broken for our sakes redeems us.

Still, time is often required to push past our pain and embrace God’s restoration. It is even possible to use our broken experiences to help others, which reflects God’s light and fulfills our purpose.

My crystal star hangs once more. Its glaring imperfections no longer bother me. Instead, they are a gentle reminder of God’s ability to mend broken people and get us back where we belong. Though flawed, the crystal still reflects the light around it. And so can we.

If you feel broken, I pray for peace and new hope for you in the coming New Year. I challenge you to allow God’s love to heal and restore you. If you’re feeling festive, show love and empathy for those who may not. We all heal in our own time. As messengers of the gospel, we should also lend an ear to those desperate for understanding. Sometimes, we do the most when we say the least.

Merry Christmas.

“I’m so sorry! I’m such a clutz,” Wendell told Mrs. Byers, the lunchroom manager, as he picked up his lunch tray from the floor. “I can’t even get my lunch to the table without dumping it.”

“No worries, Wendell. You may be a little clumsy at times, but think of all the football games we would’ve forfeited without you,” she replied.

“Huh?” Wendell asked, obviously confused. “I don’t even play football.”

“Maybe not, but you can’t have a game without lines on the field,” she answered. “And the coach said you do that perfectly every time. You get another tray, and I’ll clean up this mess.”

Perhaps we’ve all felt like Wendell at times. Feeling as if we can’t get anything right until someone reminds us that what we do matters. Often, the smallest people, objects, and efforts yield the greatest results.

Peter and six disciples boarded a big ship to go fishing. One-hundred-fifty-three fish would’ve perished had a little ship not been there to save the day by getting them to shore where the big ship couldn’t go. The disciples in the little ship aren’t even named but were there and available to do the job when needed.

We never know when God will need a small boat to do a big job. God doesn’t look for ability but availability.

The plural of ship occurs in Mark 4:36 when Jesus and His disciples encountered a storm on board a ship. They woke Jesus, and He calmed the storm. Other little ships were also with them. Little ships often don’t share the limelight, although they face the same storms as the big ships and survive.

As Wendell learned in our story, the most outstanding teams can’t play the game without someone preparing the field. God can use you to make all the difference in somebody’s life by what you’re willing to do, even if no one notices. Remember, battleships and cruise liners don’t move anywhere in port without tugboats. Be content to be a little ship. Someone is counting on you.

Think of ways to be a little ship in someone’s life. 

As a long-legged teen, I couldn’t see much over the steering wheel of our 1966 station wagon. As a result, I was terrified of driving. Nonetheless, my determined mom had me drive one day to my typing classes at the junior high school. As I inched down the hill into the parking lot, she directed me into a space facing the stone wall barrier.

“You can brake now,” Mom advised patiently. 

I picked up my foot but didn’t move it far enough over, and it touched the gas. As we slightly sped up, my mom’s eyes widened. 

“BRAKE!” she hollered. 

My foot slammed down on that gas pedal, and the powerful engine drove that station wagon through the stone wall. It hung over the barrier, peering down on the playing field ten feet below. I had totaled Mom’s new car.

That remarkable woman quietly sent me to my class while she arranged to have the car towed away. She never mentioned it again. 

That’s grace. I was never accused, punished, or commanded to pay the price. My parents simply replaced the car and gave me a year to recover. Then they bought a little car. I learned how to drive and finally got my driver’s license. 

In the same way, I was drawn before the throne of God twelve years later when Christ intervened. I had broken most of the Ten Commandments and wasn’t even sorry for half of the ways I’d grieved God. I just knew I needed Jesus and couldn’t have a relationship with my heavenly Father without Jesus’ aid. 

That was enough for God. He claimed me as his own, set His Spirit in my heart, and began a lifelong work of teaching, rebuking, redirecting, and training me in righteousness. Gently. Persistently. He invited me to walk with Him each day into eternity, for Christ had absorbed my accusation, my punishment. He’d paid for my crimes. 

Let God transform you—gently, persistently—in a life-long walk with Him into eternity.

“No, that’s not right. Do it this way.”

I had heard critical, cutting words for many years. My father was a short man—short on mercy, grace, and stature. His love was thin and hard, sporadic, and seldom spoken. When he did show love, it was on a grand scale, too grand to cover the daily paper cuts or the weekly “You’re never good enough.” It was an unmerciful love.

I learned the same hard love that ran a litany in my head: Protect yourself—always, at least on some level. Don’t show mercy because others will perceive it as weakness. Mercy makes you too soft to battle the brutal out there. And don’t make yourself vulnerable because you won’t survive the hard realities of unforgiveness.

Then, the day before Father’s Day, the first one after my father passed away, the Bible verse of the day caught me short with the juxtaposition of my father versus my heavenly Father: Be merciful, just as your father is merciful. 

On some level, my father sought to teach me to be kind—but not merciful. Doing so creates a surface veneer of shallow civility rather than deep heart-level concern for God’s other children.

Then the Lord wooed me in the dark and desert places of a heart made lonely by the hard. He walked with me to a place of brokenness where the hard either became a brittle wall or where the mercy of the One who loves me best transformed me. I had a choice. Through prayer, I chose to believe God and take my father to the Father.

Unfortunately, it is still too natural and easy to pick up a brick to recreate that hard wall and retreat behind a bombed-out fortress rather than allow my heart to be merciful to others and myself. But when it rains in the desert of God’s making, the soil softens, mercy blooms, and a deluge of God’s mercy graces my heart.

Find ways to let the rain of your merciful Father keep falling in your life.

We fear forgetting, of losing both our short and long-term memory. But the power of forgetting can be a powerful tool to help us advance and mature in our Christian growth.

Paul said we can only forget what has happened in the past. But we can also remember the past, dwell on it, recap the emotions some past experiences brought us, and be discouraged about our present and future plans.

Forgetfulness is a weakness—a human weakness. God doesn’t forget our sins; He chooses not to remember them when we confess them. And that is what forgetting is—choosing not to remember.

We will only choose to forget or not recall things when we realize the power of forgetting them. When we forget them, we have victory over them.

When we deliberately choose to forget something, we choose not to remember it. This is not referring to something that has slipped from our memory on its own but rather something we have deliberately pushed out and deleted from our memory for our own good.

Many people constantly recall painful events that happened to them many years ago. The people who caused their hurt have been dead for many years, but by remembering the event, they choose to let those things hurt them repeatedly. Deciding to forgive our offenders helps us move on with our lives. When we milk the past, we ruin our present and future.

We would be surprised how much more power, freedom, and liberty we would have to live for Jesus if we would forget “that which is behind.”

Don’t let the past rob you of power today and hinder your service to God.