The Day I Broke Inside

I wasn’t having the best year. In 2011, the economy was still fairly bad, I was unemployed, and I was trying hard to make sense of how I could best take care of my family. I can’t claim that there was anything about my situation that would set me apart from others in the same situation, as I’m sure many have been through the same thing. However, something significant happened to me during this time – I broke inside.
 
I have broken bones before. I have been in a cast to heal. With those, I was not embarrassed or ashamed, and nobody seemed to judge too harshly. Everyone could recognize the reality that a piece of me broke, and nobody wondered why I wasn’t just a little stronger and went without the cast.
 
However, in 2011, a substantial piece of me broke. It wasn’t a gradual process, it was a sudden break, just like with a bone, and pain reverberated throughout me when the piece broke. I don’t know what piece it was, other than that I could feel the brokenness in the area around my physical heart. I felt as if it placed a deep hole in the area of my heart, but my physical body was entirely unaffected by the broken piece. The piece was certainly part of another system of my body – a mental, emotional, or spiritual system (I don’t know which), a system that crashed with the loss of the piece.
 
I have always tried to be a spiritual person and pursue the things of God, as doing so had brought light to this area prior to this time. The light was good, and everything worked well when it was there. Religion had brought light here before, and I found purpose and identity in living my religion and in the light that attended my actions and beliefs. The light from my religion seemed to collect in that piece, and it served as the foundation for my emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing.
 
The light disappeared though when this piece of me broke, as the hole the broken piece left filled with what felt like darkness. The darkness was more than just the absence of light. It was so dark, it was tangible, it had substance, and was inside of me. I had never experienced anything like it before. With the light gone, most of my internal foundation was gone, including my purpose and identity as an individual.
 
For a very long time, I prayed and pleaded that the darkness would be removed, that I could have my foundation back, that I could find my sense of self again. I pleaded that I could even feel light again. Yet, the darkness remained, my prayers felt entirely ineffective, and, try as I might, I could not find the light that once served as the foundation for who I was. The pain, loss, and darkness continued, uninterrupted, with no end or sense of healing in sight. I was broken, with no idea how to put a cast around the broken piece and simply fix what broke.
 
This situation persisted for years, with me working to find answers or explanations for what took place. I have yet to understand exactly what happened, what piece of me broke, or what caused it to break, and this article does not attempt to offer facts on those things, although I may guess at some of them below. This article also is not meant to convey the impression that anything unique happened to me – as I have seen countless others get hit with similar experiences, many of which are far worse than mine. I only share this experience in order to share that something came out of this situation, and below are a few of the things I learned.
 
1.  We Lack Language and Knowledge of What Makes Us Work.  Science has done an impressive job of learning about the system in our body that can be seen, or our physical system. In my experience though, we are still in the ‘Dark Ages’ as it relates to understanding the pieces that make up our other systems – our mental, emotional, and spiritual systems. Many go so far as to claim that we have no spiritual system, rather than acknowledging the reality of experiences with spiritual matters of countless people the world over.
 
With these systems, we are beginning, as a society, to break some ground. There are medicines to take to deal with problems affecting certain aspects of our mental, emotional, and physical systems, and those help quite a few people. While these medicines are a step towards our understanding of these issues, I feel they still don’t answer the underlying question of how these systems work, what actually broke, or why it broke. Rather, they are similar to Ibuprofen, taken to deal with a headache, without ever knowing what caused the headache. Again, these are an important step forward, but much remains for us in understanding who we really are.
 
In my experience, some professionals, neighbors, friends, or others feel they know exactly what is wrong. Those that spoke up in my life had different opinions on my issue, but all, I could tell, entirely missed and did not understand what was taking place or how to fix it. Due to their confidence in their assessment, and my inability to find anyone that could relate to the feelings, I felt alone, strange, and out of place, as if I were having an experience entirely foreign to anyone on this Earth. Loneliness, I found, made the problem much worse.
 
In my experience, the loneliness comes from us not understanding the issues, not having language to discuss what we feel or experience, and not having people who recognize the reality of a broken heart, spirit, or soul.
 
Once I recognized this problem in my life, I also recognized the way to fix it – we must create the language, the conversation, and the understanding to comprehend and address the actual issues, and we develop this by sharing our experiences. Since we often feel the judgment of others, we are afraid to share, as we all want to be accepted by those around us. Ironically, many of those around us have broke in some way or another, but we view them as never having broken, simply because we never speak about the issues.
 
To be clear, there are ways to share things with others that will probably not end well. For example, when we still have deep pain from the brokenness inside, that pain can be added to by comments from those who do not understand. Or, if things are said in ways that are too alarming (posting to Facebook that you often feel like blowing a building up, for example), you may drive a wedge between you and others.
 
In my experience, in order to create conversation, it helps to recognize a few things. First, with sharing a ‘broken’ experience, using general terms helps to not create alarm, as the more specific the conversation gets, the more people do not understand how to handle the situation. So, instead of saying, as an example, that you often feel like blowing up buildings, be less specific, saying that you experience various impulses, many of which make no sense logically, but that are emotionally compelling, or something to that effect. With people that can be trusted who are close to you, it is possible to get more specific. However, it is always helpful to remember that we are just beginning to build the language, understanding, and knowledge, and so we have to start with a general foundation, rather than moving directly to the end results of where each broken piece leads. Once the foundation is in place, we can progress to more specific points and more specific understanding.
 
Second, people often say or do things that hurt, and it usually hurts because we sense that they don’t understand, or that they don’t care, or think we are weak. These times though can give us the greatest insight into a number of things, including how our condition appears to others, the lack of understanding present around a certain issue, or things the other person may be struggling with as well. If we choose to work to handle these situations in a productive way, we can ultimately gain more love and compassion as an individual.
 
For example, if someone tells me to just ‘man up’ and smile again, I can work (and I say work, as it takes time to get past the usual feelings of anger or pain that arise) to recognize that I just learned pieces of information missing to others, that I can now try to find a way to add to the foundation and language to be built. If someone perceives that I am simply a wimp, rather than broken, I then know that I need to work to build understanding around the reality of a broken piece inside, around the pieces that exist unseen inside of us, and around language sufficient to describe these things. In other words, the things that people say and do can direct what information is missing, and where I can add to the language and understanding needing to be built on these topics.
 
I do not know what broke inside of me. However, due to the fact that it so radically affected the light inside of me, and was in the same area as my physical heart, I will guess, for purposes of adding to the conversation and language, that my ‘spiritual heart’ broke that day in 2011. I guess this due to what I felt, but also due to what led up to the broken piece. By way of more background, before this piece broke, I had felt a strong spiritual prompting that I had acted on. The prompting took a lot of faith, and I had fought the prompting for some time before I finally decided to believe and act on it. I trusted that God would provide as I followed the prompting, as I trusted that it was what He wanted me to do.
 
However, things simply did not go as I had trusted they would. I took a large leap of faith at that time, and ended up, I felt, falling to and crashing at the bottom of the canyon I had tried to leap over. I couldn’t sense God’s hand protecting, lifting, or providing during that time, and my foundation of faith crumbled, as all that I could see was failure and the opposite result of what my faith said should have happened. Instead of making it to the other side as my faith had told me I would, I fell far short of the other side, and ended up far below and far off target. Falling (figuratively) didn’t immediately break the piece inside of me though. Rather, as I was at the bottom of the canyon working desperately to find where I went wrong, my piece inside me broke, and my faith and light disappeared.
 
Because of this, I call that piece of me my ‘spiritual heart’. When it broke, my faith, light, and trust in God fell into the hole left in its place, a hole full of darkness. I, of course, do not know for sure if we have a spiritual heart or not, or if that is even a factual description of what broke. I do know though that it accurately describes what I felt, so I offer it as an aid to the greater conversation as we try to create a language sufficient to convey understanding on these issues.
 
2.  Any Piece of Us Can Break.  We know that any piece of our physical body can break. Hearts can stop pumping, cells stop working, bones snap, and joints stop moving. We don’t judge a person as weak when they get cancer and simply tell them to change their attitude to make it all go away.
 
Just like our physical body can break, so too, I think, can any piece of our mental, emotional, and spiritual being. In order to facilitate the language and understanding around these issues, we must stop judging others. Instead of judging or offering advice, we can listen. We can recognize how much we have to learn ourselves when someone starts talking about something entirely foreign to us. Often, the most sure way to help a person heal is to simply listen and learn. Healing can come as hearts are knit together in unity, as opposed to being divided in judgment.
 
Recognizing that pieces actually can break will help us have compassion and understanding for others. Minds can break, hearts can break, and other pieces can too. In my mind, the beauty of our existence is that our body, and our systems, are good at healing broken pieces inside of them, provided that we recognize and address the issue.
 
Just as I am not defined by a broken elbow from High School wrestling, or a broken rib from crashing on my roller blades, so too am I not defined by a broken spiritual heart. That broken piece is not the sum total of my existence or of my value as a person. Rather, it is an experience, but it is not me. I have seen people involved in serious accidents where the majority of their body broke in some way or another, but those people also are more than their brokenness.
 
In other words, don’t judge yourself harshly when something breaks. Be willing to be patient for the piece to heal, and don’t demand that you, figuratively, walk before your leg bones have healed. Rather, it’s okay to seek understanding, guidance, and opinions from others, to find the answer for ourselves of what broke and how to heal it, recognizing, of course, that many times people will simply be wrong, but that we can get closer to the truth by weeding out the things that aren’t applicable to us.
 
3.  Not Every ‘Hard Time’ Means that Something Broke.  In working to create the language and understanding, probably the hardest thing to distinguish is when something is really broken, or when it is just injured or weak. For example, I started a new construction job years ago, and after the first day, I hurt everywhere. I had carried heavy things all that day, going from sitting for years at a desk in school to intense physical work outside. The pain was intense, and if anybody touched me it would cause me to about scream with pain. I hurt for quite some time before my body finally adjusted to the work.
 
However, the pain was not due to anything being broken. That pain was due to me stretching myself to a level I had not been at before, and was not conditioned to. With that pain, I had a choice – stop the job and return to my previous level, or continue pressing through the pain until my body adjusted and I could operate at the new level.
 
In other words, some emotional, mental, and spiritual pain comes as we try to reach a new level. Sometimes we experience the pain of progression and growth, and decide to ‘quit the job’, for lack of a better phrase, rather than pushing on to allow the progression and growth to occur.
 
As an example of weakness, instead of brokenness, at an emotional level, growing up I experienced anxiety speaking. I stuttered as a child, was teased for it, and have always had a quieter voice that is hard for people to hear. My anxiety would be especially high when asked to speak in front of others, and it was a very hard thing for me to do.
 
Ultimately, I found myself in law school, and I realized then that I had the opportunity to work and overcome my anxiety with speaking. I knew that my anxiety did not stem from a broken piece of me (as anxiety may for many others), but rather from a weak part of me. Once I realized that, I started to enroll in various moot court competitions, where I was required to speak in front of judges and others who attacked the things I said.
 
That experience was extremely difficult for me. In my first moot court experience, I appeared in front of a judge who had volunteered to help train us. My anxiety was through the roof, and when I stood up at the podium to address the judge, I couldn’t even talk. Due to the level of anxiety inside me, I stood there silent for almost a minute before finally being able to get any words out, but stumbled through the entire thing.
 
In the next competition, I appeared in front of a panel of three lawyers, all of whom were bent on letting us experience the wrath of a judge having a bad day in court. After my argument to them, the feedback I received was that it “sounded like I was talking to the Great Lakes with rocks in my mouth” (I was in Michigan at the time). These times were exceptionally hard to deal with, as my anxiety was still present and very high, and the first few experiences hadn’t helped at all, but had instead caused deep pain and more anxiety.
 
However, I decided to keep working, and I joined another competition with a classmate that had no anxiety in speaking. We practiced together, and he trained and encouraged me in many ways. In that competition, the two of us ended up winning the competition as the best lawyer team. After that, I was able to go on to a national competition and place in the top eight there.
 
I don’t feel that this experience is unfamiliar to most people, as many people have picked something to work on and pushed on through even when it was difficult or caused anxiety or other hardships for them. The point of this story is that when I had a weakness, exercising the weak points, rather than stopping the things that caused pain, made me stronger. However, when a piece of me broke, exercise of that piece only caused more problems, as it would be like trying to walk on a broken leg.
 
In other words, weaknesses need exercise, broken pieces need healing. In our effort to establish language and understanding, we have to discuss weaknesses, broken pieces, and the differences. Sometimes, it is extremely hard for us to know if something is weak and in pain, or broke and in pain, so we may have to change our opinion of the situation as we gain experience and understanding on our internal issues.
 
Ultimately, our effort to understand ourselves must include an honest assessment of what is weak inside of us and what is broke inside of us (if anything at the time). If we treat a weakness as a broken piece, it will remain weak, but if we treat a broken piece as a weakness, we will experience loss of self worth, pain, and discouragement as it will never heal due to all of our attempts to strengthen it, attempts that only keep the piece broken inside of us.
 
Most importantly, if we are interacting with a person who is experiencing issues with something, we have to learn how to help support them in a path of healing. If we push them to believing their issue is a weakness, or a broken piece, we can keep them from progressing if we push them to the wrong belief about what is inside them. This is why we must listen, care, and help. When I had a weakness and anxiety with speaking, I needed someone to encourage me to speak, not someone to tell me that I should just accept the fact I would never speak without anxiety. However, when I broke inside, I needed healing, followed by strengthening once the piece actually healed.
 
With our lack of understanding on these issues, we will get it wrong at times, both when we assess ourselves and when we assess others. However, as we discuss, listen, and learn, we will get past our mistakes and move to a better place, a place where we more fully understand our mental, emotional, and spiritual systems. If we forever fear making a mistake, we will never progress, so we must be willing to talk at appropriate times, listen, and learn, and ultimately, to say sorry when we find out we were wrong.
 
4.  God Exists, Despite, Even, Our Weaknesses and Broken Pieces.  Pain, I’ve discovered, makes it hard to feel God, especially when the pain is at an emotional, mental, or spiritual level. Pain can come from broken pieces, but usually the broken piece itself doesn’t cause the most pain. When emotional, mental, or spiritual pieces of us break, our faith in, and relationship with, God is often strained or broken as well, especially if we relied on these pieces previously to access God.
 
I have seen many people struggle with teachings in their religion, in accepting ways that God works, or in feeling that God cares about them as a person. People carry real pain associated with their experiences or their attempts to reach God. For me, I hurt a lot after taking a leap of faith – expecting to land safely on the other side of the top of the canyon – but finding myself crashing at the bottom of the canyon. My faith was crushed, my religion didn’t have answers for what happened, and I was unable to detect where I went wrong, causing me to feel that God had simply let me crash and burn and that I was not of value.
 
The hardest part of my ‘spiritual heart’ breaking was that it did not fit into the paradigm I had created of myself, life, and God. I was thrown into another reality, one where I could not sense or find God, purpose, or meaning. I was angry, hurt, and worked for a long time to decide if I still believed in God or not.
 
For me, I learned something critical through this time. When I took my leap of faith previously and acted on the prompting I had received, I had felt God’s Spirit say that everything would be okay if I took the leap. When I fell and crashed at the bottom of the canyon rather than landing on the other side as I thought I would, my faith immediately took a hit because things didn’t turn out like I had had faith they would. The key I learned was that my faith took a hit because, ultimately, I was demanding that God’s promise of “okay” match my understanding of “okay”.
 
In other words, my faith took a hit because I had my own interpretation of what God’s promise meant, and my interpretation was wrong. When I was promised that things would be “okay”, God never said I would make it to the other side without crashing at the bottom of the canyon, even though that is what I decided that promise meant. My faith crashed and burned at that time because my faith was in what I wanted God’s promise to mean, not in what His promise actually meant. God knew that I could make it to the other side, one day, and that even though things would hurt and a piece of me would break, I would still be okay. With my lack of patience and demand for things now, I simply wanted to skip over the canyon of life in one leap.
 
Looking back, I can see that things have been “okay”. My broken pieces are slowly healing, my kids were fed, clothed, and helped by many others during this time, others who cared, who brought Christmas presents when we had no money, and who helped in every way they could. In other words, I didn’t die, even though I fell so far.
 
More importantly though, I found many at the bottom of the canyon. Some may have slipped and fallen there, some may have been pushed there by others, some may have tried to jump across and not made it, like me. Many, though, were there, having moved forward in faith on a path they didn’t understand, only to find themselves having slowly descended down the one wall of the canyon, with every step forward in faith feeling like it moved them into more darkness. However, regardless of how we got there, we were there, and our choice became to stay down there suffering and broken, or try to find a way to climb up and get back to the light above.
 
What I learned about God is that God is there, whether in the light above, or the darkness beneath. Our journey through the darkness helps us, if we choose, to find God in places we never knew He would be. Our journey through the darkness helps us understand so much more about life, so much more about others, and so much about who we really are, as we are made of so many pieces unseen to the human eye. I would never have the ability to describe something invisible that always worked perfectly. Rather, to gain understanding of our invisible or unseen systems, they have to break for us to know that something is there, for us to be able to describe and identify integral pieces that make up who we are.
 
My brokenness seared into me the reality of darkness, pain, and suffering. Again, so many others have suffered much more than I did, but even my taste of it let me know the intense reality of these things. Previous to this experience, I had gained a testimony of and partial familiarity with light, but now I was gaining an intense testimony of and familiarity with darkness.
 
As I reflected on the fact that I could feel and experience darkness, I tried to understand why these mists of darkness would come into my life. While I still don’t know all of the reasons, I did find a number of reasons that the darkness came into my life. First, it helped me understand more of who I really was. When I readily felt and sensed light, making the ‘right’ decision was easy because I could sense God looking over my shoulder. When I lost the ability to sense Him, I suddenly was tempted by many things that had never appealed to me before, and as I watched how I responded to the different temptations, I learned a lot about where my desires and values truly were as an individual.
 
Second, having a piece break inside of me opened me up to receive a new piece, a better piece, one from Heaven even. In the scriptures, it speaks of being “reborn” and of offering up a “broken heart and contrite spirit.” Now, I certainly can’t say that I have done either of these, but the principles of these scriptures teach that we can give our broken pieces to God – the mortal, weak, and not perfect pieces of us – and receive a new piece back, a piece that helps us to be “reborn”. For me, the only way for me to have room enough to receive something new would be to clean out the old. While I am still working on clearing out everything I need to to receive a new piece and be “reborn” with better pieces, I recognize that this was an important step along the path for me.
 
Third, the darkness and brokenness caused me to better understand and be more compassionate to others. It is often hard to relate to someone that appears to be full of light or that has everything going well for them in life. However, it is much easier to relate with those who are struggling, broken, or hurt as we are. Somehow the journey through darkness can cause us to open our hearts and minds to others. Of course, Satan still tries to isolate us in the darkness to keep us forever lost there, but if we resist that and reach out in compassion to others, we find our way out of the darkness as we receive help from and give help to those around us.
 
To me, the darkness is something that we get through only if we join together in unity. As I’ve gone through this experience, I have learned that true and lasting happiness only comes as we establish meaningful interactions with and relationships with others. As an example, I can eat some tasty food by myself and enjoy the taste, but the satisfaction of eating disappears as soon as the food does. However, if I eat the same food with others who enjoy it as well, the satisfaction of eating with the other people continues on as part of me.
 
I believe God allows us to be weak and broken to help us overcome our biggest obstacle to eternal happiness – ourselves. We all want to do things ourselves, we want to be strong enough for life, we don’t want to let others help us or even know that we are struggling. We don’t want to trust, we don’t want to connect, as we fear the pain of broken trusts, broken connections, and unmet expectations or hopes with others. God’s way though is one of unity, connecting, and family. His way was not meant to be forged alone. Heaven isn’t a place where we seclude ourselves in mansions and never see another living soul. Heaven is Heaven because we are part of a bigger family there, because we are there with others, because we have a place, and give others a place too.
 
For me, if I never would have broke, I would have been too prideful to ever reach out to or connect with others as I should. For me to learn to be like I need to in Heaven, I need to learn how to receive help, how to open up and experience the happiness that comes through friendship, through connecting with others. Due to my pride and unwillingness to connect with others as I should, I walked a broken path, the only one where I would fall too low to pick myself back up without the help of others. This was God acting, in mercy, to help me correct the problems with myself, problems that would make it impossible for me to enjoy what really brings eternal happiness – meaningful relations with others.
 
I know that many people don’t have a lot of meaningful connections in their lives, and I don’t sense that life is super full of them for most people. Sometimes when we are alone in the darkness, we will remain there, as people cannot see us in the darkness. They can’t see our hearts, our brokenness, fears, or weaknesses, as it is all invisible to them. However, they can hear us.
 
When we are alone in the darkness, the key is to speak up, to call out, to talk and start the discussion. Even though others cannot see what is inside of us, or see us sitting in the darkness, they can hear us, and if we are stuck there alone, we need to talk, as sound travels through the darkness. Satan pressures us to not speak up, to not discuss our situation, as he knows that by doing so, we will remain lost and unseen at the bottom of the canyon, unaware to those even who are also passing by at the bottom in the darkness.
 
In other words, starting the conversation is how we find others where we are at. God wants us to learn to talk, to identify our pieces inside, and to, ultimately, find friendship and meaningful connections. One caveat, of course, is that there are people in the darkness who have different goals than us, and we cannot simply hitch a ride with anyone that comes along. We have to make sure that their goal is the same as ours, and we should only travel with those who are committed to regaining the top of the canyon, as opposed to those who stopped believing that there was a top to the canyon.
 
Another benefit to me from the darkness was that when I lost the piece that I usually used to connect with God, the only way for me to connect was to find Him in places I hadn’t relied on before. Scriptures, prophets, church, and prayer became especially important for me. While many things were discussed at church that did not resonate with my situation, I came to learn they were discussing the ‘ideals’, or the conditions at the top of the canyon. In other words, they were discussing things that could give me hope, if I chose to recognize them as something tangible that could come as I worked to heal.
 
Even when teachings or practices conflicted with how I felt inside, I learned that those conflicts showed me areas where I didn’t understand, areas where I was weak or broken, and areas where I may be putting what I wanted over what God wanted for me. Conflicts came due to me pursuing my own expectations and desires, instead of seeking to see what God had for me. However, as I worked through the darkness, the questions, the pains, and the discouragement, I found myself part of the way up the canyon, working to regain the top above.
 
Ultimately, the thing I learned about God is that following Him is a journey, a journey through the darkness, wildernesses, canyons, and abysses of life. In this journey, we meet others, we gain understanding and compassion, and ultimately, we gain the ability to become like God, who passed through the full depths of all bad that can possibly exist as He atoned for us. His canyon was far deeper than all of ours combined, and it was an essential part of His path as a God. Life is a journey, not an event, and brokenness is part of the journey.
 
God exists, even though I broke. God exists, even though there is darkness. As I continue to try and climb out of the canyon I fell into, I find my life and understanding deepened and strengthened by my crash at the bottom of the canyon. I find others at the bottom of the canyon, and am able to find real meaning in life by connecting with others who may be struggling or broken as well. Just as it isn’t fun to eat food by ourselves, but is much more enjoyable with friends or family, so too the real joys in life come through honestly connecting with another person. The happiest moments in life are never when we are by ourselves, they are always when we are with and connecting to others. We can connect by listening to and seeking to understand the experiences of others.
 
In my experience, by beginning a conversation and understanding around broken and weak things, we are beginning to develop the vocabulary and understanding necessary to truly connect with a person, to be found in the dark moments of life, and to find others in their dark places. As we share our experiences in appropriate ways and at appropriate times, we can gain the ability to connect at far deeper levels, allowing us thereby to experience joy at a deeper level.
 
Connecting to others takes time. Connecting to God takes time. For us to truly connect, we have to get through all of the pieces inside of us to reach our true core, to find who and what we truly are. Brokenness and weakness open two paths for us - 1. A path to finding out more about our desires, expectations, individuality, and ultimately, to finding God and meaningful connections with others, or 2. A path to despair, if we choose to stay at the bottom of the canyon.
 
It’s okay that life isn't always like the ideal at the top of the canyon. The ideal can only bring happiness and joy when we gain an understanding of why the ideal is the ideal, and we only gain that understanding through walking a broken road. In life, we are forced to walk some road, as life doesn’t allow us to sit still. If we have to walk and work, we can at least walk and work towards gaining the ideals in our lives, even if we don’t have them right now. As I sat at the bottom of the canyon deciding what to do with my broken life, I realized I could give up and forever remain broken, or I could turn to God, gain a better understanding of Him, and start working towards the ideals He reveals at the top of the canyon, just on the other side from where I began my journey.
 
God can heal all brokenness, weakness, and injury. Just as my broken bones didn’t heal overnight with fervent prayer, so too my broken spiritual heart didn’t heal overnight with fervent prayer. However, fervent prayer opened my eyes to the paths I could be on, and helped me crawl along the path, or open up to reach out to others and ask for help when I was at a place I could not pass myself. Sometimes, others passed me by, not understanding or taking my request for help, but as I kept trying and working at developing the ability to explain that I was broken, I found more people willing and able to help.
 
Ultimately, I feel our broken times are the darkest because they are the times at which we feel unable to reach out and find help because we feel we aren’t allowed to talk or explain what we need. We can change this though, by developing the language, the understanding, and the ability to connect with others and work together towards the same ideal – regaining the light and beauty at the top of the canyon of life.
 
While I am still on my path back to the light, I have hope and confidence that the light and beauty of life is available to us all, as we work together to cross the streams, climb the rocks and cliffs, and endure the journey back to the light and beauty that comes from working together and truly connecting with God and those around us as brokenness leads to unity, and unity leads to life.

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