Sheryl:

Brokenness

“What happened to you?”

I was often confronted with this question at school. Kids are usually more honest than adults. They ask direct questions. Some adults just stare without saying anything. I used to feel very uncomfortable when I felt people were staring at my brokenness.

You see, I was born cerebral palsied (CP). The muscles on the right side of my body tend to rebel against the instructions my brain gives them. My right foot sometimes drags a bit. Sometimes it doesn’t. When I’m tired it’s worse. Sometimes no-one notices. Or perhaps they pretend not to. When I’m tense, my right hand often curls into a spasm. Being hemiplegic, half of my body doesn’t always work as it is supposed to. A good way to describe it is to liken it to something that is quite common in South Africa – load-shedding -when the lights just stop working. In a CP, signals don’t always go through from the brain to the rest of the body. Sometimes a part of the body gets cut off from the grid.

One day in the supermarket, the teller stared. I was helping mom put groceries on the counter and my right hand decided to do its twist.

The teller asked, “Shame, did you get hurt?”

“No,” I responded. “I was born like this. “

She gave me an odd look. “Oh, what’s wrong with you then?”

Nothing, I wanted to answer.

This was quite a common occurrence. It took so much explaining that eventually, when confronted with the question, “Did you get hurt?” I would simply answer, “Yes.”

The lie and the truth

I grew up, struggling with the lie that I was the disabled kid who couldn’t be of any use. I was broken, longed to be healed. Longed for perfection. If I was perfect, I would be of use to the world.

But as I journeyed through life, I came to a better understanding of brokenness and the meaning of the scripture: 2 Corinthians 2:9

“And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’...”

In a journey that mom and I are busy documenting in book form, I learned that it’s often our very imperfections that allow us to touch others’ lives.

Sandy:

Imperfection

It happened very early one morning on a beach run in Cape St Francis. I jogged along the deserted beach towards golden-edged clouds on the eastern horizon. Every breath drew the tangy smell of the ocean deeply into my lungs. The air was salty on my tongue. It was a perfect morning.

As far as I ran, a miscellany of broken molluscs lay scattered in the damp sand. A giant hand must have reached into the depths of the ocean, closed around a random trove of marine treasure, first flung it against rocks and then tossed it ashore with little care as to what landed where.

In the wet sand ahead of me lay a conch shell. It was a heavenly white. So white, it was almost translucent. Exotically curved, gleaming up at me, the conch was perfect. I slowed to a walk and stooped down to pick it up, but quickly withdrew my hand when I saw that a piece of the spiral-shaped shell had broken off so that its central spine was visible. I ran on. Broken, it would really serve no purpose on my shelf at home.

Grace

But a terrible conviction overcame me as I jogged further. We tend to do that, don’t we? Shy away from the broken, the imperfect. Yet it was that shell’s very brokenness that enabled me to appreciate every curve of grace in its inner parts. I guiltily determined, as I ran towards the sun which was no longer hiding behind a cloud, that when I retraced my steps along the shoreline I would find the shell and pick it up. But on my return jog, the incoming tide had snatched the shell back into the ocean and I would never have the chance to embrace its brokenness.

Life can be a bit like the ocean. It sometimes grabs us, breaking us up and then spitting us out. If only, when we land broken on the sands of time, someone would pick us up and love us in spite of our brokenness. This is what God’s love does. He doesn’t look at our imperfections. He knows what breaks us up. And when we are broken, He doesn’t pass us by.  He picks us up, embraces us, loves us and strengthens us to keep on going. I look at brokenness differently now.