It is Sunday afternoon as I sit at the desk in my church office and write this. I have just come through the July 4th week, which included a three thousand person outreach that lasted until after midnight, followed by a six-hour drive early the next day to a youth camp where I preached for a few days, followed by a six-hour drive home, and then this morning’s packed, crazy, but enjoyable service.
And I am getting ready to break some things tonight.
I mean that quite literally. After lunch today, I went to town and purchased a lovely piece of pottery. I brought it to the church and put it and a hammer underneath the pulpit. When I preach the evening service in a couple of hours, I will show the pottery to the congregation and then destroy it with a stroke of the hammer. And as you likely suspect, there is a point to the picture and a method to my madness.
His name was Job, and there is a book in the Bible that bears his name. To this day, four thousand years or so later, we still use his name in modern vernacular, speaking of people who have “the patience of Job.”
Job had a life that anyone would have envied. He was the wealthiest man of his day. He was healthy, powerful, and well-respected. He had a glorious family, a wife and ten children. But in a moment of time, Job lost everything but his health. The devil was allowed to take every bit of wealth that Job owned and to kill all ten of his children in one fell swoop. Job and his wife had to endure the unspeakable horror of seeing ten graves dug and all of their precious children being put into the ground.
And then came part two of the devil’s heinous drama, when he was allowed to take the only things Job had left, namely his health and his relationship with his wife. In a moment of time, Job found himself covered from head to toe with boils, agonizing, putrid, running sores. He could not lie down without hurting; he could not stand up without hurting; he could not sit without hurting; he could not even eat or drink or breathe without hurting.
His wife broke. This shattered mother, under such bereavement, screamed, “Why don’t you just go ahead and curse God and die?” But for a moment, Job thought there might be a tiny ray of light in his darkness, for there, coming over the hill, were three old friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. But after they got done ripping him to shreds with their words and pouring a wagon-load of salt in his wounds, Job no doubt fell into the “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” camp.
But Job was not left quite comfortless. In addition to the fabulous flashes of faith that dot the darkness of his story, Job found comfort from a most unusual and unexpected source.
Job 2:8 And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes.
A potsherd is simply a broken piece of pottery. At some point, there had been a loud crash in the house of Job as a no doubt lovely and expensive piece of pottery smashed down onto the floor. For whatever reason, Job decided to keep a piece of that pottery. And then, when his body was wracked with agonizing pain from those boils, he thought of that potsherd and retrieved it. He used it to scrape away the boils as best as he could, giving his body at least a small amount of relief for a time. And if I may engage in a bit of anthropomorphism here, can you imagine what it was like for that potsherd? It had once been a lovely vase, pricey but likely unapproachable. On the day its world shattered, it likely thought that there was no more point in even existing. Little did it know that, sometime later, Job would value it far more than he ever had before.
Brokenness is not something that anyone desires. But it is also not something that anyone should give up over. Joseph’s lovely life was shattered in the pit, in Potiphar’s house, and in the prison. And then that broken life became second in command of the greatest empire on earth and saved the world. Peter’s lovely life was shattered by his own failure; how exactly does one recover from publicly denying Christ three times and cursing while so doing? And yet that broken life went on to preach on the day of Pentecost and see three thousand souls saved, five thousand in another message a little while later, and write two books of the New Testament.
God is not just the God of wholeness but also the God of brokenness. And because of that, a child of His will never just be broken; they will always be “broken just right and prepared for service.” You see, God knows what is coming far, far down the line and is in the habit of preparing for those things ahead of time. From Joseph’s day of being sold into slavery until his brothers bowed before him was twenty-two years. God knew of their needs and the needs of the entire world decades before it all happened.
You are perhaps reading this through tears as you consider the shards of your life. You may even have questioned whether living is even still worth it. Believe me, it is. God can and does bring beautiful out of broken and useful out of unthinkable. He even did so for Job, who was broken like no other. If you will simply be patient and continue to live and live for God another day, and then another, and then another, there will come a day when the very purpose for your brokenness all makes sense, and you find yourself more valuable and sought after than you have ever been.
Pastor Wagner can be contacted by email at 2knowhim@cbc-web.org