I’ve heard a lot of sounds in my life. Even when I woke up today, I heard the sounds of the alarm clock, the coffee maker and the shower head. Every healthy human being can hear those sounds. But there are times I can hear things others don’t hear. I can hear the sound of a broken spirit.
Several days ago, a co-worker burst into tears. She told me about it later, murmuring something about just being sad and weird. After she left someone said mentioned her lack of self-esteem. But I think perhaps we missed the point that day. The woman’s problem wasn’t “self-esteem”; the problem was the brokenness of her inner self. While everyone else’s diagnosis was self-esteem, all I can see was a broken spirit. “Self-esteem” is merely a band-aid we put on a serious, raw wound.
Before that incident, I was at night school washing my hands in the school’s bathroom when a girl locked herself in a bathroom stall and started bawling. Everyone else can just look at her with pity for a poor exam grade, but I see more. I saw a crushes spirit.
Our instinct is to want wholeness. A child has an instinct to want food even before it’s old enough to understand what food is. Our souls are like that; we want to be whole, we want to be nourished. A human soul is like a magnet that is gravitating towards something it cannot reach. A crushed spirit is the result of that inner magnetism not finding the thing it was created to be magnetized to.
We spend all our lives searching for that wholeness. With every new job, every relationship, every hobby, every new area of study, every road trip, every makeover, we try to nurse our soul back to health. Each of these things is like a carrot on a stick; and we are foolish enough to fall for the bait. When disappointment sets in, people sink into cynicism. And after cynicism comes the notion that something is wrong with us for wanting more.
Romance is a prime example of this. A friend once came to me and asked why she became bored with her current relationship. After she explained more context, the answer became clear to me. Here I had a girl who had gone from relationship to relationship; spending all her emotional and spiritual energies into other people, only to find at the end there was no prince. There was no fulfilled promise. She was using men to try to make her whole, and it seemed to have a counterproductive effect.
I am tired of women complaining to me they have “trust issues”. Everyone has trust issues. We have all chased after things that have hurt us and have broken promises. Ultimately the problem is not trust issues; it is a wounded spirit that has been harmed when our trust has become casualty.
Her problem was she did not know what she was looking for. She was looking for life. When I talk about life, I do not mean the state of a human body being alive, but rather a spirit life. Spirit life is the wholeness and completeness of the spirit. When our body ceases to function properly, our body is ill or dead. And when our spirit does not function and is not filled with what it was created for, we have a spiritual malady.
We search for life. I have always found it interesting that in art, life and growth is always associated with trees. Trees are beautiful examples of life; and Scripture seems to emphasize this point. Adam ate of a tree that he thought would lead to life, but lead to death. But it took another Adam – Christ – to choose a tree of death so that it would lead to life. The cross was a divine reversal.
Just like a lover promises his bride a new life and seeks to become one with her, God gives us a similar proposal. He promises the wholeness of our spirit; he promises a greater life by saving us from the effect of Adam’s tree.
The cross was God getting on one knee and proposing to us. Accepting salvation is simply a matter of saying, “I do”. And just like in marriage on earth, our marriage to God happens when we give up our independence and belong only to Him. We are His bride; not a whore. Our brokenness and confusion comes when we act more like a prostitute than a bride.
I find that most of the problems we encounter in romance originate because we don’t realize we were created for a greater romance. We become tired with our story because we were made for a greater story. Human kind is searching for something more – but we find ourselves on the wrong side of the door. Many of us know what God promises, but reading that promise is more like reading the fine print instead of watching him draw it in the sand.
Our spirit longing one day will one day be more fully known in the place we call the Kingdom of God
Perhaps God’s Kingdom is like waking up after a long dream – like you finally woke up to “real life”. Perhaps one day we will awake in God’s kingdom only to realize this was the world we were created for.
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