“This is how the love of God is revealed to us:
God has sent his only Son into the world
so that we can live through him.
This is love: it is not that we loved God
but that he loved us and sent his Son
as the sacrifice that deals with death and our sins.
Dear friends, if God loved us this way,
we also ought to love each other…
There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear,
because fear expects punishment.
The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love.
We love because God first loved us.”
(1 John 4:9-11, 18-19 CEB)
As we enter a new year, many of us are reflecting. Perhaps combing 2015 for bits of joy, even revisiting some of the moments of sorrow and difficulty. Our tendency can be to avoid those difficult moments, often because they remind us of our own brokenness and that of others, the world. Let us instead be invited to prayerfully consider brokenness, for it is precisely here where God meets us and shows us the depths of divine and human love.
Brokenness and love are not opposites. We learn to love and be loved through brokenness. Brokenness occurs because of love – they are inseparable. Each of us has our own stories of pain – typically beginning with a relationship of love and trust.
When we love we will experience brokenness, pain and disappointment. This is because no one – not a single one of us – can ever fulfill the expectations another human has of us (and vice versa). And so hurt – often deep hurt – happens.
God knows this kind of hurt. Because of the hurt, but foremost because of love, grace and mercy – God sent the Son into the world to deal with the reality of sinfulness and death. God entered into the hurt, the brokenness, because of love.
Fear, however, distorts love. Fear focuses on the hurt and misery and misses the love and grace. Learning to embrace the truth of our own brokenness is the gift of love. This gift – through the mysterious power of the Holy Spirit – transforms and shapes us to embrace others in the reality of their brokenness. Love so shared, takes root, grows deep, leaves little room for fear.
We have been given this pattern: love entering brokenness. We trust this way of God, because we have seen how the Holy Spirit transforms the hurt and brokenness into deeper love. This transformed love is characterized by beauty, grace, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, humility, faith, patience, peace, gentleness and self-control.
Let us enter this New Year in expectation that God will do something transformative and magnificent and that we get to witness the beauty, participating fully in this life of love.
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