Fracture

"Fracture" was the title of my teaching in church yesterday. We explored the fractures of our lives that are often uncomfortable for Christians to acknowledge. Everything is supposed to look like a Thomas Kinkade painting, right? Warm, fuzzy, elegant: no cigarette butts in the gutters, no guardrails flattened, no static on the line. But our real lives look more like a Jackson Pollock abstract, with fissures and edges and a wild mix of color.

The idea of fracture led us to the mystery of grace. Grace as the undeserved, unmerited favor of God's love WHILE we are YET chasing after far lesser loves. While we are ALL fractured beings clinging to the grace of Christ's redemption of us. Grace as the space to breathe. Grace as the permeating fluid injected into our lives through the cracks of fracture.

Engineers build computer models of fractured structures. They call it "fracture mechanics." Look at this...

A fractured structure with fluid injected into the fissures. The true picture of what our lives are like. Philip Yancey, in What's So Amazing About Grace, quotes C. S. Lewis...

"We are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us...through grace we become 'jolly beggars.'" Yancey continues, "Our wounds and defects are the very fissures through which grace might pass."

May your spiritual discipline this week be injecting the grace of God into the fissures, the fractures, of the lives you encounter. May the Spirit of God remind you of your status as a jolly beggar before God.

Joni