Cracked Pot

I wish I weren’t a lot of things.

I wish I were funnier. I botch jokes all the time.

I wish I had a better memory. My friends laugh at how they remember my schedule better than I do.

I put a granola bar on my car’s dash board to let me know when I take turns to sharply, trying to drive better, but my friends laugh at this and are still scared to ride with me.

I wish I didn’t have people anxiety, but a lot of the time I lock up around beautiful people and you know… even not so beautiful ones.

I wish I weren’t so fragile. Just an off-handed, pretty benign comment from a friend or family can pop my mojo for a day.

I wish I were different in a lot of ways. I usually put the majority of my efforts toward fixing these things but I’ve been realizing that they are who I am and are mostly unchangeable. And that makes me really, really sad.

I’m like a water pitcher severely cracked and barely holding it together. I can’t even keep the water that I was made to hold from leaking out of me.

It was in that depression that I asked a very close friend why he valued me as a friend, because I needed to grab onto something that would give me value. His response was very hard to hear.

He said, “The thing that I value in you is that you understand brokenness.”

This spread the fissures in my trembling pitcher a little more. It was undeniable. I was severely broken and leaking profusely. What value do I have?

But he continued, “And it’s because of this that you understand people in their brokenness and pain. And it helps you love people better.” Later he told me that I had saved his life at least twice because I had come over to be with him on some really hard days. I guess he needed someone who understood his cracks.

It took me the next day and a half to gather the scattered shrapnel of my mojo but I started thinking about what he said. And realizing that he was right. I do have value. And though it isn’t the value that will draw charismatic people to me or make me the obvious candidate for moving up at work, it is a perfectly fashioned skill to be used by the one who makes the pots and knows what they are really for.

It’s like my cracking pitcher was meant to leak water all over so that thirsty people will be quenched.

I hope I leak with living water.

And so lately, when one of my flaws is held up in front of my face, I am beginning to laugh at it too, because I know that though I’m cracked in a dozen pieces, God is holding me together exactly the way I am supposed to be. And you are exactly the way you are supposed to be. And He will use exactly who we are, and each of our cracks, to be instrumental in making this dry land better than it would be without us.

Raw Spoon