Soul Gardening

Humans sometimes say they feel broken. A part of their lives has fallen apart, and moving forward is painful or seemingly impossible. If this is happening to us, we can be consumed with what got us to this immovable place. The obstacle may be ours, or may belong to someone we love, because we also feel broken when we cannot fix someone else. How do we start to feel whole again? How can we make our days less wracked with worry and concern, and change our nights back into what used to be peaceful sleep? We long for a magic wand to sweep the broken pieces into a distant past we no longer remember. Yet there is something to be said for war wounds, and the battle scars of what we have already survived. If we are still here, we have truly survived what may have been the very worst period of our lives. It doesn’t matter if they are physical, emotional or mental scratches, scrapes, or trauma…they are evidence of survival…of endurance…of persistence. A co-worker of mine once was so embarrassed by the scar running down her chest from heart surgery that had saved her life. She didn’t have the perspective that she was a warrior and should be proud of that battle scar, as she had survived so much. Perhaps we are ‘perfectly broken’ because we are designed to be that way. We are created in the image of God, and because we are human we will always have faults. We will have emotions we do not know how to handle or how to show. We will have reactions we don’t know how to control, and feelings some say we should not have. We may display our anxiety and pain in ways that are not socially acceptable. And then there are the medical issues and addictions that add to our struggles and pains. Maybe we should look at what happens to us in life as part of our learning process that was created for us. We are to grow and we are to learn, and hopefully heal and teach others a better way to be present in this world, therefore stopping the hurt and pain from being passed from generation to generation. The process of living and learning and fixing ourselves often makes us incredibly beautiful human beings who just happen to have many memorable events happening in their lives.