Have you ever taken a new baseball glove straight
from the store to the field? If so, you
know the frustration of using the unusable!
Stiff. Inflexible. Awkward.
The hand knows what it wants to do, but the new equipment doesn’t
cooperate! Balls bounce off the outside
of the mitt we cannot open and they pop out of the inside of the one we cannot
close!
It was my brother who taught me how to break in a new glove. We would coat ours – inside and out – with vegetable oil. Then we would place a ball inside and wrap the entire glove tightly in twine so the softening leather would form around the ball. The next day, we’d unwrap the glove and put it to use. It wasn’t long before our new purchase was “broken in” – now a help and not a hindrance. Better than new!
We celebrate the new believer in Christ. High fives all around! Yet over the years, I’ve noticed God’s people, too, are a bit stiff and inflexible ... that is, until we’re broken (in).
Take Judah, for instance. Even though he saved Joseph from family conspiracy, it was he who convinced his brothers to sell into slavery this favorite son of their father. But the aftereffects of sin turned out worse than Judah had foreseen – they always do! – so what followed was life lived in guilty silence as his father, Jacob, needlessly mourned the loss of his precious son. Judah had given into peer pressure, discarded Joseph’s freedom, protected his own good standing ... and all at the expense of his father’s grief. Who can possibly carry that load of guilt?
So it was a broken Judah now standing before the second-in-command over all of Egypt. It was this broken Judah who could not bear the thought of his father mourning the loss of another son. And it was the broken Judah who offered himself to captivity in place of brother Benjamin. “Now then,” offered Judah to the Egyptian ruler, “please let your servant remain here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy, and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father” (Genesis 44:18, 33, 34).
How far Judah had come! From slave trader to substitute ... that’s brokenness! From apathy to empathy ... that’s brokenness! From me-first to me-last ... that’s brokenness! From comfort to sacrifice … that’s brokenness!
And no matter how we get there, "Broken" is a suprisingly wonderful place to be. For broken people are free people. They are no longer constrained by the cares of this world, liberated, instead, in the love of God.
No matter what trials we encounter, God goes with us. And when we trust him and follow him, we come out the other side at a place called, "Broken." There, God can use us – a flexible, pliable, dependable us – softened and conformed to his image.
And ready to “play ball!”
[Click here to see the daily reading in Genesis 41:1 – 44:34.]
It was my brother who taught me how to break in a new glove. We would coat ours – inside and out – with vegetable oil. Then we would place a ball inside and wrap the entire glove tightly in twine so the softening leather would form around the ball. The next day, we’d unwrap the glove and put it to use. It wasn’t long before our new purchase was “broken in” – now a help and not a hindrance. Better than new!
We celebrate the new believer in Christ. High fives all around! Yet over the years, I’ve noticed God’s people, too, are a bit stiff and inflexible ... that is, until we’re broken (in).
Take Judah, for instance. Even though he saved Joseph from family conspiracy, it was he who convinced his brothers to sell into slavery this favorite son of their father. But the aftereffects of sin turned out worse than Judah had foreseen – they always do! – so what followed was life lived in guilty silence as his father, Jacob, needlessly mourned the loss of his precious son. Judah had given into peer pressure, discarded Joseph’s freedom, protected his own good standing ... and all at the expense of his father’s grief. Who can possibly carry that load of guilt?
So it was a broken Judah now standing before the second-in-command over all of Egypt. It was this broken Judah who could not bear the thought of his father mourning the loss of another son. And it was the broken Judah who offered himself to captivity in place of brother Benjamin. “Now then,” offered Judah to the Egyptian ruler, “please let your servant remain here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy, and let the boy return with his brothers. How can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? No! Do not let me see the misery that would come upon my father” (Genesis 44:18, 33, 34).
How far Judah had come! From slave trader to substitute ... that’s brokenness! From apathy to empathy ... that’s brokenness! From me-first to me-last ... that’s brokenness! From comfort to sacrifice … that’s brokenness!
And no matter how we get there, "Broken" is a suprisingly wonderful place to be. For broken people are free people. They are no longer constrained by the cares of this world, liberated, instead, in the love of God.
No matter what trials we encounter, God goes with us. And when we trust him and follow him, we come out the other side at a place called, "Broken." There, God can use us – a flexible, pliable, dependable us – softened and conformed to his image.
And ready to “play ball!”
[Click here to see the daily reading in Genesis 41:1 – 44:34.]
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