You are not just a spiritual project

There's something I've been sitting with for a while now, and I imagine if you've spent any real time in church, you've likely noticed this as well. There is a heavy and persistent focus on the brokenness of the world and humanity. The church feels like it opens itself as a spiritual hospital to reflect on your moral shortcomings and rehabilitate your soul to be more like Jesus. And just to be clear, I'm not arguing that the brokenness isn't real and doesn't need to be addressed. The world and our hearts are fractured in ways that are impossible to ignore.

But what I've been wrestling with is what happens when this brokenness becomes part of your identity? When it stops being something we acknowledge and starts becoming the entire narrative that we live inside of? I've found there is a difference between those two things... and it can be a slippery line between the two.

The church that I used to celebrate for having the hard, convicting conversations I now am feeling unsettled by because I grew tired of feeling like a spiritual project that will always fall short of the glory of God but should never stop striving for it.

When the story you are constantly told is the world is broken, you are broken, and everything is fallen, that becomes the lens through which you see everything. And the lens you look through shapes what you find. If you are always subconsciously scanning for evidence of brokenness, you will never run out of it. But you might start missing everything else.

God has been showing me something over the last year that has quietly been shifting the way I experience my life. The original design for this earth — goodness, beauty, wholeness, connection, love — is not some distant thing we're waiting to access in a faraway heaven someday. It is available right here. Right now. The kingdom isn't only coming, in many ways, it is already here and waiting for us to step into it.

This reframe changes more than you might think.

I can look at this world and see its brokenness. Or I can see the relentless pursuit of a God who never leaves our side no matter what. I can focus on the evil and wrongdoing. Or I can look for all the ways God redeems and restores, every single time. And once you start looking for that, you start seeing it everywhere. In the friend who shows up at exactly the right moment. In the way something painful slowly becomes something purposeful. In the fact that nothing seems to be beyond repair in divine hands.

This is not toxic positivity or pretending the hard things aren't hard. It's a choice about which story you let define you and your life.

I feel there is a church epidemic right now of people who are fixated on their brokenness... and that fixation is actually unknowingly keeping them there. This is not because they are weak or faithless. It is because the narrative they've been handed and continue to repeat to themselves is: I am broken. The world is broken. This is just how it is. And so they stay there because there is no way out in that story.

But what if there is a different way? What if the invitation isn't to fix yourself, but to just seek the goodness and beauty in life and trust that God will manage your brokenness? I don't mean abandon your morality or checking out of your own spiritual growth. Please do not use grace as an excuse for carelessness. But perhaps we could release the exhausting grip on self repair, and trust that restoration is actually God's work, and it is already being done.

I've found that when I've let go of the self repair and I just keep finding ways to connect with God — through meditation, prayer, reiki sessions, sound baths, time in nature, slow mornings watching the birds, loving on my cats, gentle walks, and enjoying the life God has given me — that my heart just seems to change somehow. Sometimes it is through experiences that change me for the better, and other times I simply look back and realize those aspects of myself are just different now and I can't quite put my finger on how it changed.

There is a balance, as there is with everything. If this has struck a cord, perhaps bring it to God and ask for assistance with changing the narrative of your life. Ask to see the beauty more than the brokenness.

I love you, and God loves you more!