Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:04 Hi and welcome to that makes total sense. The podcast where we talk about faith, finance and everyday life in a way that makes total sense. I'm your host Alexis city. On this podcast you'll hear the personal stories of friends I'll be interviewing who are doing familiar things in new and innovative ways. We'll answer questions specifically about money and our relationship with it and we'll explore faith and Bible teaching together. In all of these. It's not about changing our convictions as much as it is about messing with our methods. We'll have a lot of moments here together where we pause and say that makes total sense.
Speaker 0 00:46 Hi, I'm Alexis B city and welcome to that makes total sense. So today, can I just say it's been a rough week. It, it has been a rough week and I had two other solo episodes planned to record today and neither one of them worked out. And when I was looking back through some of the material that I've written and um, some of the articles I put together and, and just trying to find out like what am I going to record for today? And I really, really felt like I was supposed to record this episode about brokenness, um, about brokenness and about healing and about the process in between. So here I am, here we are today and I'm going to talk about brokenness. I'm talking about brokenness and healing and it's been kind of a good week to do that. So if you are feeling like you might be in that spot as well where there are some things in your life that just feel broken, I just, I hope this gives you some amount of hope.
Speaker 0 02:05 I hope that God ministers to you while you listen to this. So this first, uh, first part of this episode, it actually started way back this summer. Um, this was right after my grandmother had passed away, which is not at all why w why I was struggling, but I was struggling because I'm thinking back on this moment where, um, I brought home a mug from her house, um, after the funeral and I was heating up my coffee one day in the microwave and this mug, it just like, I don't even know how it happened. It just like slipped out of my hand and it fell on the floor and I was instantaneously devastated and then surprised and then elated because this mug bounced like it bounced off of my wood floor. So here's what happened. Um, when I was in Oklahoma, after my grandmother had passed away, she was the last living grandparent for us.
Speaker 0 03:19 And so I don't know if that's, that's happened for you is kind of a different family era, you know, we're stepping into now and before I was leaving, I had spent the week there and before I was leaving, my aunt basically told me that I could take anything I wanted and I was overwhelmed. Of course, I know, I know most of you have been there and, and I didn't really want anything necessarily. I just took very, very few things. But because I have ended up following in my grandmother's love for coffee and reheated coffee and coffee's still at four o'clock in the afternoon, I decided to take home a couple of her coffee mugs, like the ones that I remembered her using. And this particular mug that dropped that day was one. When I, when I saw it, I was like, I want this one, but I don't even know why.
Speaker 0 04:10 Like there's just something that seems special about it to me. And my aunt reminded me that it had belonged to the set that lived at the Lake cabin that my grandparents had and they shared with our family when we were growing up. And so I remembered it, it was super special to me. And so I brought it home. I was drinking my coffee out of it and one morning and boom, it bounces on the floor. So I pick it up. I'm so thankful that nothing has happened, but I, you know, clean up the mess, put it in the sink and just kind of move along that day. Well, of course later it went in the dishwasher with everything else. And when I was unloading those dishes, I noticed on the bottom of that mug that there was a chip. And I hadn't seen the chip before.
Speaker 0 05:01 I thought I had examined the mug, you know, cause I was so thankful it hadn't broken. And I looked it over and, but I hadn't noticed the chip. But what happened was when it was upside down in the dishwasher, my perspective changed because I was seeing it upside down, completely upside down. I didn't think it was the first time I was seeing it that way, but, but when that's all that was showing, that chip became obvious. So I pull it back out, I set it down on the counter and I'm like thrown off because it didn't even wobble. And so I was so thankful. I thought, yes, this mug, it's, it's a trooper, right? It's fallen, it's got this chip, it's, it's like hanging in there. And so I hung it on the hook and the cabinet and then went along with the rest of my chores for the day.
Speaker 0 05:55 So another few days pass and I'm pouring my coffee that morning and I see my mug and I'm like, yes, I'm going to, I'm going to use this, this like miracle mug. And I pull it out of the cabinet, set it on the counter. Sure enough, it's not wobbling or anything. And I, I have to kind of interrupt your, we make some pretty amazing French press coffee at my house and so I had this, this incredible press of coffee. I start to pour it in the mug and lo and behold, I hear this creaking sound and as I'm hearing it, I'm pouring it. I'm watching this crack move down the side of my mug and I'm like, what in the actual world is happening right now? Like I'm hearing it, I'm seeing it. I'm like,
Speaker 1 06:45 Oh no. I'm like the fall, the fall from days before,
Speaker 0 06:51 before I had examined it, it had gone through the dishwasher and apparently it had gotten a crack that I couldn't even see. I didn't even realize it had sustained this injury until I tried to use it for something and then it hit me. That's the way it is with us sometimes that's the way it is with me. A lot of times moving right along and then something happens and we slip and fall. And this fall could be emotional, it could be spiritual, it could even be physical, but so many times we get up, we dust ourselves off. We might even take a look around and see if anybody else noticed and then we start examining our own selves for injury and we think everything feels okay. It feels fine. I look okay, no bruises. So we pick ourselves up and we move along as if nothing happened, maybe we're a little sore or maybe we move on and think the pain that we're having is normal. And so we just go on without another thought about it. But we haven't actually moved ourselves toward actual healing. The next thing happens, part of our world gets turned upside down just like my mug got turned upside down in the dishwasher and we see ourselves from a different perspective and then maybe we notice, Oh no, that piece is missing.
Speaker 0 08:35 Maybe we even test life out a bit to see if we can still stand up like I did with my mug.
Speaker 1 08:46 We figure, okay, we can balance it, does it. These things might have gone wrong, but it's okay. We can balance it. We're fine. It
Speaker 0 08:52 doesn't matter that it's missing that that piece. We like regroup and we recenter and we try to go on and serve another day without really focusing on the injury and we all do it. It's, it's not a bad thing necessarily that we do it. It's with good intent. We think all will be okay or maybe sometimes the opposite happens. Instead of our world getting turned upside down, we start experiencing something amazing like something great, like something so awesome that we just know that thing is going to fill us up, whatever it is, and then we hear it just like I did with my mug. That resurfacing of the fracture and we experienced that pain all over again. Maybe it was something awesome that was happening at work or a new relationship or friendship just feels right. We can sense that God is pouring into us, but it's hard for us to hold what he has because we've got a fracture. We've our broken selves, we haven't really healed from the last time we fell or maybe from the last 20 times we fell. So I don't know about you, but sometimes I find myself trying to maintain this appearance and nothing is wrong, but I don't know. Sometimes with that crack we end up kind of leaving a puddle around us like like with a broken mug,
Speaker 0 10:35 but God is not afraid of that. Thank you Lord. He's not afraid and it doesn't, it doesn't scare him to keep moving forward with us. God pouring his goodness into broken mugs, into broken vessels is a part of his plan for healing us. It's not God's plan that we would stay broken. It's his plan that his power and grace would show through our wounds, through our cracks, through our fractures, to express to ourselves when we see it and hear it and to people around us that there's hope in him because we're all broken. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, this is second Corinthians actually puts it this way and I just love the way the passion translation words in. We are like common clay jars that carry this glorious treasure within so that the extraordinary power will be seen as gods, not ours. Though we experience every kind of pressure. We're not crushed at times. We don't know what to do, but quitting is not an option. We are persecuted by others, but God has not forsaken us. We may be knocked down, but not out. I just love it. I just love it. It reminds me of that song we used to sing in college. You know, we're pressed but not crushed, persecuted, not abandoned, but we're the common clay jars and we carry this glorious treasure inside of us that yes is better than even the best French breast coffee.
Speaker 0 12:28 It's God's extraordinary power to be seen as gods and not ours inside of these common clay jars that we are God once, Oh my goodness, I just believe it's one of his deepest desires to fill us, to fill our cups to overflowing while simultaneously mending the cracks that are in our lives because his power, it's not like that coffee that's just going to run out. It's going to fill those spaces. It's going to fill the bowl and it's going to fill those cracks too. When his glorious treasure comes into our common jars, that remarkable thing happens. It's the substance inside that God is pouring in that's actually sustaining the jar and not the other way around. So I'm going to say that in a different way. When we have a mug or when we have a jar in the natural, that jar is what is holding or sustaining the the liquid that gets poured inside, but with God, it's upside down. Like so many other things in the kingdom. It's the substance that God pours in. It's his extraordinary power that are actually sustaining us as the common clay jars and not the other way around. In the natural, when something breaks a mug or a jar or something else, it can't be used anymore. For the purpose that it was intended for,
Speaker 0 14:09 a broken mug is useless, but in the spiritual realm, in, in kingdom economy, the opposite is actually true. When we're broken, what's being poured inside of us keeps us from being defeated. If we allow it and when we're broken, we're, we're far from useless, we're far from useless. We're being prepped for victory. In those cases, God's grace and his power and his purposes flow into us. And while some escapes through those cracks, it does so with the intent to show the outside world a glimpse of what's being poured in. But this whole process, this whole process of God pouring and healing and, and, and our, our jars being broken and mended again, I do believe, like I've said, it's God's desire to do this for us and NSN through us. But I would also submit that this process is not entirely passive. We're not just a mug getting coffee poured into us. We're not just a jar getting oil poured into us. It just sitting there. We're not lifeless. This isn't a passive thing. We have a part to play in all of this. We have a choice. We can ignore the breaks in our lives. We can pretend like nothing's wrong and we can kind of go about our business or we can acknowledge the breaks, the fractures, the cracks, and we can allow God's power to work inside of us. We can recognize that it's working and be a partner with him. Um, in working toward healing,
Speaker 0 16:10 when we acknowledge the breaks in our lives and God's power inside of us, we put ourselves in a position to show off God's grace to the whole world. Just show his grace off to the world as being seen through our fractures. We still have to be filled up regularly. That's a real thing. You're just like every other broken vessel on the planet. But we understand who our sources and we can also keep a watch on our leaky places and the ones that we know are there and the ones that show up and surprise us and we can make sure that they're treated with care. Right. Um, I didn't look this one up, but there's another scripture, I think it's in Peter about um, the weak vessel being treated with care. We can do that for ourselves and it's a good thing. And when we do that, then we can try to see to it that those places don't grow larger and inflict even more pain on us.
Speaker 0 17:12 And sometimes unfortunately on the people around us. So we can be partners with God in our healing. We can engage in this process. Um, and I think he wants us to. So just a little, a little postscript on my mug. It, it seems like a bit of a miracle at the time. But you know, a couple days later my husband brought me coffee and that same mug I had kind of set it aside and thought, Oh, I need to, I need to glue that. I need to tend to it, you know, just like I was, I was talking about and um, and I still do, but a couple of days after that, he actually brought me coffee in that mug that had been set aside cause he didn't really know kind of the trauma that it had been through at all, all of this, all of this stuff that had been going on with it.
Speaker 0 18:04 He just, he just saw it set aside and it was out. And so he poured some coffee in it and brought it to me. And I could see the evidence of the crack on the side cause it had kind of turned coffee colored, but it stayed together. Like it remained intact and it wasn't leaking at all in those moments. I mean, if it was, it was like slow. Um, cause I didn't see anything come out and it wasn't detrimental to my morning coffee. But because of the fall and because I saw that crack and that chip, and because that mug is precious to me, I treat it now with a special amount of care. Um, it's going to be inspected when it's used. It's just, you know, when everyone would be like, so ginger with it when they're handling it. And I think there's a lesson there for us to, that, that we should see ourselves that way.
Speaker 0 19:06 And it's okay to treat ourselves and others that way around us. We treat those other broken vessels with ginger care and make sure that, that we're recognizing them as the precious, um, broken things that we all are, that, um, that God is, is filling up and mending and healing with his goodness and his power and his grace. I think it's a, I think it's a good reminder to me and to us that we can look at ourselves and others that way. Cause we don't always see the exact places that, that each other are cracked. But when we just kind of remember that they're there and remember that we're fragile, then we'll treat each other with special care. And when we do that, we can emphasize on the work that God is doing inside of us and the power and the goodness and the Gracies pouring into us as his clay jars and not on the weakness of the breaks and the brokenness themselves.
Speaker 0 20:22 So I hope that encouraged you today. Um, like I said, it was plan C for this recording today, but, um, I think I just needed to, I needed to read it again. I needed to hear it again for myself. And I just needed to be reminded, um, that we're all in this together. We're all in this boat together. We all have broken places of them that sneak up on us. Some of them that we knew were there and we were trying to be careful and we, you know, banged it against the table in any way on accident. Um, and, and we can just be reminded that even in those broken places, God is so good. Um, he made us, he knows that we're, that we're broken, he knows that we're work in progress and he loves it. He loves to see that process and, and, and, and that progress and to pour into us. Um, just like Paul said, and I just want to encourage all of us that we might be under pressure, but we're not crushed at times. We don't know what to do, but quittings not an option. We may be knocked down, but not out because we carry this glorious treasure
Speaker 2 21:42 with him.
Speaker 0 21:46 So thank you again so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss an episode. Share the link with your friends. You can visit us at <inaudible>. That makes total sense.com and until next time, this is Alexis. Be remembering to do well for ourselves so we can do good for others.
Speaker 3 22:05 <inaudible>.
