My glass is half-empty, thoughts on a Christian struggling with depression
A lot of people talk about their moods with the metaphor, “my glass is half-full.”
Well, because of my struggle with depression, most days my glass is at best half-empty.
When it gets really bad, my glass is all broken up. There’s no water in sight.
And sometimes, well-meaning friends try to help me. They come at me with glue and duct tape and spackle. It the person is a Christian, she might say “maybe there is sin in your life that you need to confess.” “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” “How can you be sad when the victory is yours?”
This is how they think my glass should look:
But through the years of going up and down with depression, I’ve learned that the really beautiful parts of me have come to be through my brokenness. God doesn’t hand me a parfait cup and tell me to get my act together, to try harder, to get outside and take a walk in an effort to feel better.
No.
When I’m all broken up, he holds me.
He quietly shows me that when I am broken, I am most beautiful to him.
Some would say that I am a glass half-empty kind of girl.
It’s true. I am.
And even though there are days my body is racked with pain without reason, even though some days everyone around me sees the sun, and I am in the dead of night, God crouches down next to me and whispers in my ear: this is how I made you. You are beautiful to me, empty, broken glass and all.
Christ is building his kingdom with the broken things of earth. People desire only the strong, successful, victorious, and unbroken things in life to build their kingdoms, but God is the God of the unsuccessful – the God of those who have failed. Heaven is being filled with earth’s broken lives, and there is no “bruised reed” (Isa. 42:3) that Christ cannot take and restore to a glorious place of blessing and beauty. He can take a life crushed by pain or sorrow and make it a harp whose music will be total praise. He can lift earth’s saddest failure up to heaven’s glory. -J. R. Miller
Christ is building his kingdom with the broken things of earth.
This is how I made you. You are beautiful to me, empty, broken glass and all.
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