For a long time I thought I was not broken.

I was happy. I had a good home, a good-enough job, plenty of material things to keep me satisfied, the ability to travel, the ability to help others, hope and possibility tucked up under my breast bones as snug as a brooding chicken settled into its nest.

Even recently, when I heard a preacher preach that we are all broken, I stopped and considered. Am I broken? I look around me and see the broken spots of others. But am I not whole? I had such a beautiful childhood, so much love.

But a deeper, sadder part of me feels my brokenness in pots that boil deep beneath the surface. I have run up against my own inadequacy lately and bruised my forehead, hard.

One thing I have lately realized is how much I bank on my performance, how hard I try to do things right, better, and best, and how much I measure my worth by the results of my performance.

I haven’t told you this much, unless I’ve implied it, but the days just past have been some of the most stressful of my life. I was doing college, caring for a child, caring for an elderly man, trying to act like I had it all under control, and I did. Calm cool and collected as a cucumber. I got this. I am efficient. I organize. I work hard. I don’t notice the spiderwebs until weeks later when I see them hanging in sheets above the curtains and wonder just how long they have been there.

But there was a thing that came up. A conversation where I thought I wasn’t meeting Ivan’s needs like the wife I wanted to be, that I was letting him down. (Ivan hadn’t understood the conversation that way, so if I had opened up and started talking instead of curled in a hard ball away from him on the bed, it might have ended differently.) My heart hurt so bad. And there was no one around to take the blame, no one but me. So I lifted my hands and started beating my forehead hard. I must be punished. I hated myself.

I never self-harmed before, never understood why people did it. I thought it was because they felt unloved and lonely, but now I know. It’s because they can’t perform. If they could do better, the world would be right, but they can’t and so they must be punished.*

Ivan grabbed me and told me in a loud, firm voice to stop beating myself. “I hate myself,” I said.

“Don’t hate yourself,” he said, in that same authoritative voice. “You’re pretty in the eyes of God.” It wasn’t until that moment I realized what a harsh taskmaster performance is.

*I don’t fully understand all the motivations for self-harming in others. This is how it was for me.

All my life I’ve measured my worth by what I do, by how I behave, by the depth of my devotions, by the height of my ice-scream scoops on the 100’s chart at school. And what do you DO when you try your hardest and your performance fails?

I have been realizing more and more how wrong it is to measure my worth by my actions.

Marriage and motherhood have also brought me to this realization, because they call for a response from a deeper place, a more private and genuine place than I have ever given before.

I’ve had to raise my head and step forward while acknowledging my own inadequacy for the task. I’ve had to mother not knowing the best solutions of mothering, to wife not knowing how to love well, to share from my heart to another individual even when that heart was imperfect, unholy, and focused on self. In a marriage, you have to let the thorny places out, because if you don’t, the marriage dies. And so someone else besides yourself realizes that thing you never admitted before: that you are deeply selfish and deeply inadequate. You cannot perform well in a marriage and then go home. You are home.

Brokenness is the opposite of performance. Brokenness brings us to a place where we can accept that the grace of God covers our wrong, that we don’t need to beat ourselves when we perform badly.

Godly brokenness says, “I am broken, but I walk forward in faith. I hit the wrong note in the opening lines, but I play on, contributing my notes to the orchestra. I stumble before the finish line, but I get up and move forward, okay with finishing in last place. I have a piece missing, but still I sit ready in the china cupboard, willing for someone to drink from me, willing to serve.”

Brokenness says that imperfection is okay. Imperfection in others. Imperfection in me.

Looking for worth in performance, really, is just another form of brokenness.

Peter Mommsen writes in an article in the Plough on the beauty and strength of disability and handicap:

Both Mary Ann and Duane [two handicapped individuals] show the face of what it is to be fully human, fully beautiful and good. To be human as Christ was human involves pain. It requires vulnerability, an emptying of one’s own power, and dependence instead of autonomy. It leads to perfection, but of a different sort than the one Socrates had in mind: “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). This perfection is available to every human being. It is full of promise.

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