Does God "Prepare" us for Good works? Part Two

Brokenness, What is it?

To read part 1, click Here 

I’d like to expound briefly on the idea that God doesn’t prepare us for the good works that He has for us.

I haven’t changed my mind on this yet. In fact this past winter confirmed that I am so unprepared. I was reading Exodus and found that I could understand the Israelites. In chapter 4 Moses shows up and tells them that God is going to release them from the oppressive hand of Egypt. It's Party time! They are going to be a free nation.
In chapter 5 Moses goes to Pharaoh and demands their release. Can you just see the Israelites in Goshen, biting their finger nails, waiting for Moses to come with the news of their freedom? Alas, it's not to be. Pharaoh hardens his heart and instead of letting them go free, he tells his task masters not to give them anymore straw. The Israelites were expected to make bricks for the Egyptians and the straw they used had previously been delivered to them. Now here is the real catch, even though they had to gather their own straw, they still had to meet the old quota for bricks each day. WHAT? You’re kidding me, right?

That's when it hit me. I feel like I have the same quota when it comes to raising my adopted daughter as I have in raising my bio kids. BUT I DON'T HAVE ANY STRAW! At least that's what it feels like when I'm blind-sided by a situation that I never saw coming and have no idea how to respond to it. I want to shout to God, "Hey! Could you give me the straw please, 'cause I got nothin’."
No, I’m still not prepared and now I have the huge task of brining another beautiful child into our family, through adoption, and trying to raise him the best that I can.
Just to fill you in, we have been in the adoption process for two years now. Our son is still not at home, but as I write this, (9-7-14) my husband and I are packed and ready to leave for Korea on 9-9-14. We are so excited, yet this journey has not reached its conclusion yet. You see, we are going to Korea to meet our son and to appear before a family court judge. Then we turn around and come back to Colorado to wait for about another month, then we will go to Korea again and bring our son home for good. I can’t tell you how difficult the two year wait has been and how much joy we have that the end is in sight.
Now, let’s talk about brokenness and wholeness. For six months of the past year, God brought me through a time of brokenness. Remember that song that I referenced in the last blog post? Well, I haven’t heard it much for some time now, and just this week it was on the radio again. Here is what the chorus says,
“I won’t give you more, more than you can take and I might let you bend, but I won’t let you break. Ooooh, oooh, I’ll never, never let you go. Don’t you forget what He said.” Group one crew, “He said” I’m only telling you who performs this song to give them credit for their work. Now, please don’t boycott this group because of this blog post. Use your heads people.
This is a miss conception that runs wild in our churches. And let me tell you, I want desperately to believe this. As I pointed out last week, God never promises not to give us more than we can take.

God has shown me that brokenness is not what we think it is. When we are broken, we feel useless and unloved. What we don’t see, is that God is at work in us. He is able to take the broken pieces of our hearts and make something beautiful. Not only does He use our broken pieces, He mixes them with someone else’s broken pieces to create a master piece. Adoption is like that. Adoption is a process of grief for all parties involved. But, God can bring healing and create beauty from ashes.

Brokenness is the process by which we are made whole in Christ. It’s not a very easy process. It hurts like crazy. It shows us what we truly believe, not what we tell ourselves we believe. Most importantly, it shows us who God really is and reveals the image of Christ that He‘s conforming us into.

This song is a much better representation of what God does through our brokenness. Because, we might bend, but we might also break.

This summer, my kids and I did a project together to illustrate how God takes our broken pieces and mixes them together to create beautiful works. We were led through this project with some wonderful insights and imagery. I’m not going to explain it all to you, but here is what we did. We each picked a plate, wrapped it in a thick piece of fabric and smashed it to bits with hammers. This was everyone’s favorite part! Then we mixed all of the plate pieces together in a bin. We used mortar to stick the pieces on a large cement stepping stone. Each person arranged them in any design they wanted. After the mortar dried, we went over the stone with grout. Here are the stones that we created. 

Not bad for a bunch of broken plates, eh?

Fun fact; I wrote some of this post while I was in South Korea. We met our son and were waiting to appear in court as part of the adoption process. He should be home in about a month! (9-15-14)

As of 9-22-14 we are back from our first trip and have our initial approval for the adoption, so we should be able to take custody of our son sometime the week of Oct. 20th. (Hopefully)
It’s amazing what God can do in the time it takes me to write a blog post.