BROKEN | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: BROKEN | Previous Challenge Entry
By Daniel Rae
06/14/16
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He was walking out of the grocery store, halfway to his car, when he burst out crying. It's like the weight of his world all at once, crushed his shoulders and broke his stride. He just stood there in the dusk and in the pouring rain. For the first time ever he felt like giving up. It's said that depression and hopelessness are really just the inability to construct ones future. But his loneliness was becoming an acute disorder, and his sense of failure was increasingly overwhelming. What had once been the brightest of possible futures, was now a plummeting descent into failure. Sometime, merely months ago, everything he'd counted on in life, began to fizzle.

Something was desperately wrong; something he'd never before experienced. He felt like a man on the precipice of a cliff, who despite the knowledge of imminent danger ahead, kept walking. When he got to his car and out of the rain, he literally broke. He felt the gravity of his circumstances overcome him. His self-esteem and optimism, had increasingly gone from effervescent to entirely flat. He was out of time and out of luck and out of hope.
He was broken.

It had long since been his routine that when he was flummoxed or emotional, he wrote. Since a child, six years old, he'd been writing; a somewhat therapeutic means of preserving himself. For when he wrote, he controlled his circumstances, and he controlled the outcome.
As usual he'd write tonight, and in the process begin once again, to evaluate himself. The words came easy, for they were already sequestered in his mind :

*
I never draw the blinds at dawn
I stay in bed till daylight's gone
I'm on the brink of 'can't go on'
I'm broken.

I sleep for 20 hours a day
I hide from bills that I can't pay
I'm lost and just can't find my way
I'm broken.

And worst of all it's certain, like the flowing of the tide
Any day I'll have to face the ones I love
I'll tell them that my lucks run dry
It's not as though I didn't try
Now I'll be gone, so here's goodbye
I'm broken.

Paintings that once graced the halls
Are hanging on the neighbours walls
Like they were never mine at all
I'm broken.

Sorry if I've let you down
But remedy cannot be found
I just can't stand to stick around
I'm broken.

And worst of all its certain, like the ebbing of the tide
Any day I'll have to face the ones I love
I'll tell them it's with deep regret
That Ive not found my answers yet
That what we had, is all they'll get
I'm broken

I never draw the blinds at dawn
I hide away till daylight's gone
A splintered heart that can't go on
I'm broken.

I'm certain that it's plain to see
I'm not the man I used to be
I'm now embarrassed to be me
I'm broken.
*

>>>Some forty years earlier, as an eight year old, the message he'd heard every Sunday, finally sunk in. The devotions at the dinner table, that delayed his return to his friends outside, were gradually making sense. A weekend with his grandmother, who was completely committed to the Salvation of her offspring, led to a prayer from his heart that plead with God for his mercy and forgiveness. The words he prayed in bed, when his father bid him goodnight, had rather suddenly become entirely meaningful. He was being brought up in the way he should ultimately go, by Christian friends and family, that were preoccupied with his eternity. They were planting a seed that would eventually take root, becoming a tree so strong that even the most inclement weather, or passage of time, could never uproot his resolve.
Four decades later, most spent squandering his Christian heritage, the way he was brought up would be the only thing that kept him from unspeakable despair. The only thing he had left, to go back to. There in the dark, with rain smashing off his car, he arrived at the very spot that God, before the foundations of the Earth were even laid, had directed him to find.
Psalm 51 says that it is in our brokeness, that God can finally reach us. It's hopelessness that spawns the desperation we need to truly prepare ourselves for the miracle of Salvation, and restoration, in Him.
For even when all hope is fizzled out, He's still there.

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