Broken Pieces

May 1984, Scranton, Pennsylvania

The cinder-colored snow piles in the high school parking lot are finally beginning to melt, and winter is finally loosening its grip on this arctic coal mining town. The afternoon sun casts spotty shadows through dirty 19th-century windows, against the clock that I prayed to every day to move a little bit faster. This is tenth-grade English, and I’ve just been summoned to Miss McDonough’s desk.

I know what’s coming, and I consider making a run for it, but we’ve already made eye contact. Miss. McDonough stares into my soul with her icy blue eyes, then down to the grade book between us. Pointing her severely trimmed fingernails to a number in the low sixties, in a frustrated, staccato voice, she says,

“You are going to fail.”

 Leaning back in her chair, arms folded, I think she wants a response, but I’ve got nothing. As her words hang in the air like a pop-up storm, I give her the most unreadable expression in my arsenal, and silently walk back to my desk with my vanishing dreams of becoming a writer not far behind.

Meanwhile…

I was a quintessential latchkey kid of the 1980s, spending vast amounts of time alone without the basic creature comfort of a working television set. But I had something better, even beyond a library card that bore witness to my insatiable appetite for a gripping plotline. It was my dad’s IBM Selectric typewriter, where in those countless hours of isolation, I burned up miles of carbon typewriter ribbon creating impossible dreams, as though putting them on paper would make them all come true. It was an unconventional playground that I now realize God was using to shape me into the writer that He wanted me to be. But He was barely in the periphery of my mind.

Bombing 10th-grade English wasn’t the first of my academic failures, and it wouldn’t be the last. Awful things happened, both in and outside of my control, that pulled me into a riptide that I don’t think anyone believed I’d recover from. Graduating high school within the slimmest margins, getting fired from a fast-food manager job, and suffering the devastating loss of my grandma (which, for the longest time, I thought was my fault), I hit rock bottom and realized that I couldn’t do life without God’s help. Or my sister's, apparently.

May 1991, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

She made it sound like I was doing her a favor, but we both knew that when my sister invited me to live with her in Harrisburg, she was hoping to save my life. One of the first things I did after settling in was drive myself to a Bible-believing church and walk in, as if I had nothing to lose. I was like a child taking my first steps into the arms of someone who truly loved me. I landed a solid job that paid the bills, and three years later, I met a boy who saw right through my past hurts and lavished unrecognizable, unconditional love. So, I married him.

What I didn’t see coming was motherhood. Yes, my husband and I agreed we wanted to have a family, but what did that even look like?  I felt less equipped to keep a tiny human alive than to graduate with my class. And yet God blessed us with three of them. With each one, I was in survival mode, barely keeping my head above water, but in hindsight, I see how I was able to draw on the experiences of my childhood and match them with the challenges of theirs. God had taken my broken pieces and turned me into a mom.

Then, in slow, almost imperceptible increments, God gave me the desires of my youth and beyond. I asked for a church where I could be involved, and he gave me Living Water. I asked for one or two solid Christian friends; he gave me an entire women’s ministry and a bonus round of theology geeks who meet on early Sunday mornings. I asked God to be a writer, and He introduced me to someone willing to give me that chance.

It is not what I envisioned. It’s even better.

While God’s faithfulness is one of the enduring anthems of my life, there’s another angle to consider. God takes imperfect, broken, and often misunderstood people to nurture His children and spread the gospel in ways we could never have imagined.

Like Moses with his speech impediment: Exodus 4:10-11 ESV “…but I am not eloquent…I am slow of speech and tongue. Then the LORD said to him, ‘Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?’”

 Or Joseph, who was left to die in a pit. Genesis 50:20 ESV “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God (Oh! I love those two words put together!) meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.”

And who can forget the boy with five loaves and two small fish who fed the masses? John 6:9,11 ESV “’ There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?’ Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish as much as they wanted.”

And finally, Paul, who persecuted Christians until he met Jesus on the way to Damascus, struck him blind, then put a pen in his hand to write a few passionate,  instructional letters that are the mainstay of our Christian living.

We may never make history in the same way that these individuals did, but changing our small corner of the world is no less important.

What will you do with your broken pieces?