From The Desk of David

I’ve always wondered why we use the word, “brokenness,” to describe human fallibility. Was it for melodramatic effect? Did the humans at the beginning of time feel the need to project their own views on human fallibility forever? Why use a word so hopeless? Broken. Webster defines that word is something damaged beyond repair. How hopeless is that. Is all of humanity destined to never be able to be repaired again? Did the author of the children’s nursery rhyme get it right? “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Is this our fate? To be left behind on some brick road, scattered into a million pieces, with no hope of ever finding wholeness again. But what if there is beauty to be found in the never being able to be put back together all the way ever again? Sure, I’m sure the king’s men could have fashioned Humpty Dumpty back together with superglue and tape and nails, but he would never go back to being perfect again. What if there is beauty in that? It wouldn’t be hard for the village people to notice the King’s men’s rigging of Humpty Dumpty back together. There would be cracks. There would be bruises. There would be scars. But what if that is the beauty of it all? What if humanity was never supposed to go back to the way it was? Sure, forgiveness can be offered. Justice can be served. Evil can be defeated. But nothing can quite be returned to how it once was exactly. Snow White still had the scar from the apple lodged in her throat. Cinderella would have calluses from scrubbing the floors far after she moved into the palace with the Prince. Hensel and Gretel would still have burn marks from shoving the witch into the oven. Perhaps we use the word, “broken,” to signal that despite our best efforts, the impacts of fallibility can never quite be reversed. There’s no potion to drink. There’s no enchantment to be enacted. There’s no magical plant to take root. But what if that’s the point? What if the point of human fallibility is that there is no cure that we can find within ourselves? Perhaps the only one who could put Humpty Dumpty together again or heal the scar in snow white’s throat is the author himself? What if our brokenness serves as a reminder that we are not capable of creating our own happy endings ourselves? What if we are destined to encounter evil which is in dark forests and partake of apples from evil queens not for the sake of suffering but so that we have to rely on the author to put us back together again? You see, I think the only thing the author of that children’s nursery rhyme got wrong was which King he took Humpty Dumpty to in the first place. And maybe that is what we get wrong to? I know I’ve gone to the wrong the king trying to put me back together again. And maybe, just maybe, you have too…

For His Glory,

David W.