brokenness on Homesickness

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to born ...

No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us.

In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is...

This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore…. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.

May God bless you with tears of lament that mourn over the injustice of our world.  May you be blessed with a holy discontent over the way the world is.  May the Spirit of Jesus shake you out of com...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

If we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They...

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

Sometimes, it only seems that the hurt wins.

This [brokenness] is what needs to be accepted. Unfortunately, this is what we tend to reject. Here the seeds of a corrosive self-hatred take root. This painful vulnerability is the characteristic fea...

“We're all broken, all walk with a limp. Here is the truth about you and me: even when in a far-off country, wasted life, stripped bare, smeared, squandered, nothing but scar tissue and shameful, ...

Our life is full of brokenness - broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and ag...

Merciful God, we turn away from the pains and cries of our world. Overwhelmed by its brokenness, we ignore the call to engage and love those who are hurting. Father, forgive us, strengthen us, and hel...

True brokenness is a lifestyle - a moment-by-moment lifestyle of agreeing with God about the true condition of my heart and life - not as everyone else thinks it is but as He knows it to be.

If ever there were a true "just as I am" church, if ever there were a community where everybody could bring all their baggage and brokenness with them without neat and tidy happy endings qui...

Summary of the Text Songs of Ascent Psalm 133 is part of the Psalter’s collection of the Songs of Ascent, Psalms 120-134. The Songs of Ascent were sung by the throng of pilgrims making their way to ...

It is remarkable that a word like ‘Bethlehem’, forever connected to the birth of our savior, could be transformed into a symbol of confusion and chaos. Yet, this is precisely what happened. St. Mary o...

Human beings do not readily admit desperation. When they do, the kingdom of heaven draws near.

Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with our dependence on anything other than Him for fulfillment and security. No matter how committed we may be to God, we’ll always fight the inclination to do th...

The church is not a select circle of the immaculate, but a home where the outcast may come in. It is not a palace with gate attendants and challenging sentinels along the entrance-ways holding off at ...

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

When Napoleon was bombing Vienna in 1805, his shells rained down across the city, striking buildings at random. One cannonball crashed into a schoolroom, shattering walls and windows. Inside, an eight...

Gracious God, on Sundays we come to this place and you fill us up with your goodness and light and we are renewed. But when we go out into the world, we fall short in so many ways. We confess that we ...

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Brokenness is the shattering of my self-will - the absolute surrender of my will to the will of God. It is saying “Yes, Lord!” - no resistance, no chafing, no stubbornness - simply submitting myself t...

Ann Voskamp, in her book The Broken Way, describes what it was like to have mental illness trivialized from the pulpit, as someone who identified with similar struggles: I was eighteen, with scars a...