The Great Fixer

I loved this article by a woman I have yet to meet and who I hope someday to meet in person (tho' that may be as unlikely as me someday taking all my kids to Europe - still, I can say I'd like and hope to!).

It's an article about fixing things, entitled Fix You.  Do read it in its entirety! Here's how it concludes and then where I think it necessarily leads us.

Parenting is a relationship, and it occurs to me that all relationships — at least the real, meaningful ones — ARE essentially about having the same conversation over and over again. And that conversation boils down to the soul-cry: Why can’t you love me the way I want to be loved? We’re all waiting on the Fix-It Pile with our broken hearts, and sometimes a parent or friend or spouse will paste us together for a time. Sometimes we gather the tools and strength to repair our own cracks. But in my experience there’s never a permanent fix — not in this life, at least. We keep breaking, and having the same conversations over and over again. I’m unaware of a single person who’s made it to the end of their life, and who couldn’t have used another dab of glue or piece of tape.

I don’t mean this to sound completely hopeless, because I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s liberating. There are fairy figurines in this house whose wings I will NEVER permanently affix to their bodies; there are cracks in my children that I can NEVER mend. But in parenting, as with the rest of life, I think we get points for trying. And trying again.

I don't think we get points - God is not interested in our works in that way.  We don't earn anything.  But I do agree this account of our brokenness is not hopeless, but full of hope.  We have a God who has promised to care for us, and to rescue us.  We are all broken and we do all need fixing.  And our very maker can and will do it.  In fact, he has already done it.  In providing Jesus as our savior, he has given us the way back to him, to restore our broken relationship first w/him and then w/others.  This is the message of the Bible, from start to finish.  We're broken, and he can and will fix it, if we in faith trust in him!  A fix for sin, grace for the weary, peace for the broken-hearted, and hope that does not disappoint.