In the Ruins of Me

In the ruins of me I find the seed of something planted a long time ago.

It drives me and disappoints me, leaving me breathless in both awe and desperation – two sides to the same coin, but who carries change around anymore?

Only the poorest of us, who cannot live without it. Or maybe those of us who are most alive, eyes wide open for any glimpse of sun in the sand. The rest of us live numbly in-between, fooled by our own sufficiency and blinded by routine.

“Better than” and “good enough” are temporary illusions purposed for betrayal. Escape is fiction. We all come to our ruins, it’s just a matter of when. We notice their ruins before our own, until one day we come to understand the entire world is in ruins. All of us. Together. Ruined.

The veil of innocence removed, we see the rubble and deduce we are at war. Uncertain of our enemy we throw rocks in both attack and defense, crying out in heated desperation, “Who ruined us?”

My dear, who told you you could be whole?

It was the broken things.

We hate them. We argue, isolate, and mourn because of them. We blame everyone else for them, but we never blame truth. So distraught by our pieces we ignore the message they bring.

We hunger because our bodies were made to be nourished. While we may have been trained in how and what to eat, we were not taught to hunger for it comes as a natural result of lacking that which we were designed to have.

Brokenness is neither an offense to argue our way out of nor a hopelessness to make our bed and die in. Brokenness is evidence of a wholeness woven into our being before we even began. We were not made to stay hungry nor are we made to remain broken, and we know it. Somehow, we know we were never meant to be in pieces, yet we are.

Ruins are a reality we all stand in. We can choose to ignore it, but if so, our chosen ignorance imprisons us to the illusion of our own abilities as we serve a life-long sentence of mediocracy. We can also choose to accept what is broken not only in others but within ourselves, then lay down in defeat, our identity lost to the rubble of what we will never possess the power to fix. Or, we can seek to avenge ourselves, picking up what we believe is useless debris without realizing we are weaponizing pieces of our own being, sacrificing purpose for destruction.

Yet, in ruins we will remain.

There is, however, an opportunity for the humble – those who see their own brokenness and do not disown themselves nor the ones who may have contributed towards their broken pieces, but instead, acknowledge the possibility that these ruins may, in fact, offer them a truth they would not have otherwise gained.

But to accept such truth we must first acknowledge our lack. In acknowledging our lack we must admit to some internally known need to be whole. To accept our need to be whole we must be humble enough to confess what we do not have and rather than blame the world for what we cannot seem to understand, look to our ruins to find the seed of something...something planted a long time ago.

“He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”- Ecclesiastes 3:11