Some of the headlines on cnn.com today are about the New York governor caught with a prostitute, Liberian troops forced to resort to cannibalism, the arrest of a man suspected of killing a Duke student, an archbishop kidnapped and killed, and a 16 year old girl that had been held captive as a sex slave.
We live in a broken and fragemented world, full of broken and fragmented people. We see it all around us, from the headlines to our own road rage and latest screaming match with our spouse. Of all the things that mankind is capable of, chief among them seems to be hurting each other.
At Mosaic we believe this is because we are broken, and broken things hurt. There’s a collection of poems and songs in Scripture called the Psalms. In the 31st Psalm, the author recounts some details of the broken world of his day, and agonizes over his own brokenness. He says, “My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak. Because of all my enemies, I am the utter contempt of my neighbors; I am a dread to my friends–those who see me on the street flee from me. I am forgotten by them as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery.”
Haven’t we all? We all have sharp, jagged, edges that hurt those around us. Most of us are not content to be like this, most of us want to be ‘put back together’ again, to be whole again. We believe that is God’s plan, that He is remaking us, renovating us, redeeming us. We believe that God wants to take us in all of our brokenness, and join our pieces together with others in community with His all-encompassing love. We believe that, if we will allow Him, God can and will ‘put us back together’ again, but as something even better and more beautiful than before. We believe this happens in community with our brothers and sisters in Christ. We realize that we need each other, because it is in our brokeness we come together in Christ. We believe it is only in this community of believer’s cemented together in His love that we can once again be whole.
So we will covenant to journey together, believing that we can and must give strength when we have it and accept others’ strengths when we need them. In so doing, we believe that God is using us to create a wonderful mosaic of sharp, jagged, broken people who have come together in Christ…and found that we are much more beautiful together in our brokenness than we ever could have been on our own.