Brokenness and Becoming

When I started working at Indwell, I was still broken into so many pieces. But God used me exactly where I was at. What a beautiful thing it is to be used by God when you feel the most useless. What a beautiful thing it is to see your broken pieces be used to connect deeper, to love more fully, and to truly empathize. 

There is this absolute beauty that shines through when we are most broken. It is truly hard to fully understand unless you have sat side by side with someone you love who is in pain. When you sit next to them, the more you can see from their viewpoint. The more you can see from their viewpoint, the more you see God’s heart for them. 

Before working at Indwell, I had this incessant need for everything to go as planned. It used to shake me to my core when things didn’t go as planned. But honestly, when I started at Indwell, I was so broken down and so many parts of me so crushed that I just didn’t have the energy to plan everything perfectly. I kid you not... things went wrong nearly every day. We once went on a hike to a waterfall that included 289 stairs, and our group included one resident who was blind and another who used a wheelchair. Oh, and there was actually no waterfall. Yeah. I'm not exaggerating. That happened. 

But you know what also happened… the most beautiful memories were made. Because I didn’t have it all together (okay, I had very little “together”), every day was like a big game of problem solving. But it wasn’t me doing the problem solving. It was all of us. Me and whomever had decided to join me that day, usually embarked on ridiculous adventures getting lost on the bus, chasing non-existent waterfalls, and trying to get frisbees off of roofs.

They taught me bus routes and I taught them to keep laughing. On Canada Day, I took a group of them to see fireworks. The bus to get home took HOURS. At one point, we were literally stuck on a bus that didn't move for 30 minutes at 1am. I was delirious. But as tired as we all were and how much we just wanted to be home, we kept laughing. I was continually making random friends on the buses and so we made friends everywhere we went.  

It was never a relationship where I was “in charge”. It was a relationship where we had a rough plan but who knew where we would truly end up. It was a beautiful freedom that I didn’t expect. It was like a part of me that woke up for the first time and began to thrive. 

When we come to the end of ourselves, it is there that God begins and says “finally you are going to let me steer the boat”. He was always in the boat with you. He was just waiting for you to get tired enough in your own strength to finally let Him show you the ropes.

Working at Indwell showed me the ropes of how to love authentically. To sit shoulder to shoulder and begin to see a new viewpoint. It showed me that I had so much left to learn and what a beautiful place it is to see how much more there is to learn.

I pray that you will begin to recognize that God has so much in store for you and every broken piece of your heart. Just like a seed, when we break open, new life grows and it grows in ways you won't expect.