Chapter 23 "Sitting in Brokeness"

Some days May felt like she wore her skin inside out, other days she felt like the slightest tap on any part of her body would lead the rest of it to shatter into a million little pieces. She loathed those days of brokenness and emptiness. She learned to sit through them, to sit still, and to wait patiently for the mood to lift and to be filled. She waited for a new day, when the insecurities shaken by a restless mind would settle back to a stable surface.

If beauty was found in brokenness, inevitably, she would find something stunning those days at the end of August, because the brokenness seemed bottomless. Sometimes it was hard and ever so painful to sit and wait. How does one visit and love others when they feel parts of themselves are missing, when they are not whole? She learned how to live outside of herself on those days. Some might consider it fake, to smile and laugh with people when the smile is a mask and the laughter is a mere shallow echo from empty chambers of the heart. She strived to be genuine while she was drowning inwardly in her tears.

As she was being refined in these flames of brokenness she saw her own inadequacies rise to the surface. Her shortcomings were exposed and she found herself walking on grace’s shore. The massiveness of this beach in which she walked, she could not grasp. In her hand she held a morsel of what set her free to bare the brokenness that was upon her. This one grain of grace was so vast and so much more beautiful then anything she could ever illustrate. She dared not even an attempt describing it because she could never give justice to its’ splendor. Walking on this shore, so immense, deserving not even one grain but being given the entire beach, to be loved that much, was in itself overwhelming and almost unbearable. She could not bare the weight of holding another grain in her hand because with it was the weight of the cross.

She sat in grace filled brokenness knowing the emptiness would be filled and the darkness turned white beneath His red cloak. She lifted her hands and kept singing joyful songs that came from a heart that was being purified.