Brokenness..
This is generally a place that none of us want to be. We don’t want to feel those things or mentally and emotionally work through being in that place. How exhausting. Lucky for me and my World Race family, this is a state that Adventures in Mission puts a lot of value in us being. Here’s the tricky part though.. We are not meant to just sit and dwell in this place for forever. It should be motivating us to shift our dependence from ourselves or ungodly things. I have learned that when we embrace our brokenness but don’t let it be a driving factor to dependence on Christ, we are setting ourselves up for failure and even more struggle. Welcome to my life of burnout last month and the beginning of this month. I do believe that this was one of the biggest factors (definitely not the only factor, but a big one) in leading to some personal burnout.
An article I read put the purpose of brokenness to dependence simply (I’ll paraphrase): ‘It is defeatist to be broken without dependence. We are inconsistent with God when we choose to sit in our broken state. In 1 Kings 19:4, when Elijah runs from Jezebel in fear and a sense of failure, he cries out to God to take his life. In his broken circumstances which resulted in internal brokenness he wasn’t driven to dependence and therefore experienced defeat.’ Christ is about life transformation, which means that we, his people, should also be. He will never just leave or abandon us, we even see this later in 1 Kings 19:11 where God calls Elijah to go forth and stand on the mountain before the Lord.
My brokenness should have been leading me to dependence on God, but instead I found myself in my own independence and walking in circles. I knew the “should and will” formulas but knew I was circling the mountain in front of me. Feeling stuck and not knowing how to take the first step – I took the situation on like a World Racer is supposed to; I pressed into it. I also had a gentle reminder from my favorite/life verse Deut 2:3 – I had been circling the mountain long enough and needed to turn north. I prayed and asked God, ‘What is stopping me from getting to dependence on you… How do I hand these broken pieces over to you and learn to trust you to put them back together?… How do I get back to the mountaintop?’
I got a one word answer that just kept popping up everywhere: “humility”. I had spent the previous months learning a lot about pride and what that looked like not only in my own life, but in the Christian walk, and in this world. God started showing me areas in my everyday where I am reliant on my own strength over His and am causing myself burnout.
He has made me Brittany, the Jesus in me is what he wants me to give. That comes naturally when I am walking in my identity and sharing the lessons that He has given me to learn. There is humility when I am choosing to be the person He has made me and not pridefully acting out a role that I think anyone else needs me to be. It takes true humility to come to a place of dependence. Let’s think about the Pharisees for a minute, they are a people that didn’t realize that they were truly broken – they were dependent upon themselves and their own efforts and accomplishments. Attempting to be dependent without brokenness leads to being elitist. We need to believe and recognize that we are a destitute and broken people, not rely on our own behaviors, but on Christ’s behavior on our behalf. Times of brokenness should be driving us to greater dependence upon Christ, ultimately driving us to further humility.
Part of humility for me in this past season was looking at the words independence and dependence and recognizing that I saw dependence as a sign of weakness and independence as a sign of strength. It is so contradictory when we look at it from a Christian versus non-Christian view. I am called to operate out of a place that looks like weakness to the world – dependence and not out of personal strength in independence. We need to be dependent on Christ, but also the Christ in one another. I believe once we can choose to be stripped of pride and choose to humble ourselves then brokenness will be coupled with dependence and we will experience deliverance. From here we are walking/talking testimonies of God and all of his characteristics.
…ps: don’t forget the role that repentance plays in this hot mess as well
