Author: Hilde Raastad
There seem to be a lot of cracks right now. Life, for many of us, is not as it should be. There is unbelievable violence. There is grief. Anger. Loss of hope. Some of us might cope with these cracks better than others, but few of us are, I guess, totally free of anxiety, regret, despair, fury, loneliness or whatever else is creating our cracks. It is easy to make a list of all our brokenness and describe the cracks around us and in us that we sometimes hide, want to run away from, or just cannot cope with. It is easy to dwell on them, as well, because they so easily consume our thoughts. I, for one, spin around in my worry for the future, the uncertainty of life and everything that right now seems too complicated to handle. Life is never predictable, but during these times, the uncertainty of life is glaring at us. And our thoughts spin. Over and over again they spin, and sometimes they simply wear us out.
In a Norwegian hymn (Laer meg aa kjenne dine veie), there are two lines that often come to me when I am at the brink of total exhaustion, a victim of spinning thoughts and widening cracks. In English, they go something like this: “When I have worried myself to death with my own thoughts,
Then tell me what your thoughts are, God!”
When we are at the edge of giving up – because of exhaustion, overwhelming injustice, or the unrelenting pain the cracks and their brokenness cause, when we have thought and prayed and fought to find our way forward, and we just want to give up, we are told to lay our burden down and listen to God. And even more, we are told that we can take all our spinning brokenness and pile it into God’s hands and let God cope with the brokenness. It might sound easy. It is not. It might sound like the ultimate release. It is.
“Come to me,” Christ says to us. “All of you who struggle and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
Sometimes, we need that rest. To heal. To just be. To maybe regain some strength, if possible. We will probably still grieve and be angry; we may be overwhelmed with anxiety and pain. But maybe, just maybe, by letting our spinning thoughts and our brokenness spill down into God’s hands, we might, once again, be able to love fiercely, to take up again the fight against injustice, dance without restraint and regain our ability to have a dream. God’s love is wide enough and strong enough to get us on our feet again if we only find the courage to let God in.
“There is a crack in everything,” sang Leonard Cohen. “That’s how the light gets in.” There are small cracks and large cracks in most of us: vulnerabilities, broken dreams, hopes that are lost and love that seems impossible. “There is a crack in everything,” I believe that God says to us. “That is where my love comes in. Through your cracks, that is how I come in.”
