Broken Shells 

Yesterday I was hunting for shells on the beach with my six year old daughter Maeve.  It is one of her favorite beach hobbies and in San Diego we often get really low tides that make the search all the more fun. 

While we were walking the beach together she would run ahead of me, dig out a shell, and run back to ask “Is this a good one?”  Most of the time I would put it in my pocket, but on one occasion, I said, “Nah, it’s broken, we only want the whole ones” and threw it back onto the sand.   

Maeve’s response caught me off guard.  She ran over, picked up the broken piece of clam shell, and said “But it’s still beautiful to me.” 

When we got back to our chairs she showed me a bucket of all of the shells she had found while I was out surfing – more than half of them were broken fragments of shells that at one time had been whole.  Most of us would walk by them on our search for shells that were perfectly complete, but to her, the broken pieces of those once unbroken shells were worth something. 

What if every person we crossed paths with today had some level of brokenness? And what if that brokenness was the window to seeing what is whole?
The man at the counter.
The woman at the gas station.
The driver you flicked-off on en route to work.
The waiter at the Mexican restaurant.
The pregnant lady at the pool.
The actor.
The trucker.
The doctor.
The pastor.
The student.
The mom.
The boy laughing.
The woman crying.
The man praying.
The child.
They’re just like the rest of us; we’re just like the rest of them.
Broken.
It comes with the package of a beating heart and breathing lung. And whether manifested through a broken-heart, body, spirit, or mind, brokenness is a part of being.                                                                     And yet we resist it.                                                                                                                                                         We treat it like a cancer, like a part of us that’s wrong and needs to be defeated, or as an obstacle preventing our wholeness. Every once in awhile you'll come across a person willing to work with their brokenness, versus fighting it, but they’re few and far between, and usually the quieted voices of culture.  I wish we believed every person we crossed paths with today had some level of brokenness. And that in that brokenness was the window to seeing what is whole.