Humpty’s Fall

I am thinking this morning about the thoughts of Humpty Dumpty laying there at the bottom of the wall looking at all his pieces laying around. If he were living in the present, he’d think, “I have fallen off the wall and I am broken in pieces.” No blaming, no fear about what will happen now that he isn’t running things any more. It is what it is.

Brokenness is horrible when it is happening. It doesn’t matter what it is, a plate, a person, a family, a building, an institution. It is horrible for those who are in it.

All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put Humpty together again, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t reconstructed. It just means that the old solution of fixing thing didn’t work this time.

Have you ever tried to put a broken pitcher back together? Depending on the damage. It is pretty hard to get the pieces glued back together perfectly. One may have to discard some pieces and create new ones to make the reconstruction work, but fixing it to the point that it can hold liquid may be impossible. So one may have to create a new use for it. Put a plant in it or paint a picture on in. Set it on a shelf to remind all those who see it what brokenness looks like. Or you can let it leak and set it in your garden to water the plants slowly. My daughter Heidi would call it “repurposing.”

When a house collapses, it is sometimes found that there was a flaw in the foundation and reconstruction may mean attending to that before any more work can be done on the rest of the house. For structure collapses, sometimes the problem is in the ground upon which it sits.

There are couples who can tell you about the pain of brokenness and the hard work of mending. One member of a family can break a whole family, but families have survived brokennesss. How many stories do you hear about reconciliation after years of brokenness? Unfortunately it is often on someone’s death bed, but in God’s world, I am not sure it matters when it happens but if.  As with a broken house, sometimes people have to talk to experts who know about structures and repairs.

People in recovery know what brokenness is and if their recovery is real, they know that brokenness is just a prelude ot the construction of something new, something more real and more beautiful.

In my pretty long life, I have seen both the breaking and the mending…in all of the above scenereos.  It continues to go on around me all the time. I no longer get rattled when some material thing breaks. I do get rattled when breaking is about people coming to the truth about themselves or about relationships, but those are times I need to remember Humpty Dumpty. He was put back together but not by the king’s horses or the king’s men.  I think they bailed before they got to see the new Humpty.

I have come to the conclusion (for today), that the sooner we accept that this is the way of things, both the joys and the pains, the better off we will be.

I haven’t mentioned God so far. But don’t be deceived…the God I worship is in every piece, every fall, every gathering up the pieces, each drop of glue, every word spoken, every change of heart. God is not only the mender, but the broken one.