Why Your Life Is Broken

Why is your life broken? It is broken for a reason. A very good reason. Your life is broken because it is supposed to be.

Say what?

Bear with me. When we say we are broken or busted or damaged goods, we are lying. To ourselves and to others. Not intentionally of course. In our heads, we might truly believe all those stories. To us, they are the truth. They are our reality. But they are not reality. They are stories. They are the things we tell ourselves to feel comforted, to feel justified, to feel less responsible, to feel vindicated.

Please understand, I am not saying that bad things do not happen to us. Of course they do. Sometimes it is our own fault, resulting from our own bad choices. Sometimes it is the fault of others. But we’re not here to discuss assigning blame or responsibility. We are here to discuss why you are broken.

When I was in college, my favorite art history class was Greek and Roman Art. The ancient Romans created stunning, intricate mosaics. Mosaics are created from dozens, sometimes thousands, of tiny broken fragments of tile and pottery and glass, and then reconfigured to form a new image. Sometimes the artist will purposefully destroy other works of art to get the raw materials, the broken fragments, needed to create a new artwork.

To quote Pablo Picasso, “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

Personally, I do not believe in accidents. I do not believe in fate or randomness either. I believe in a Plan. With a capital P. I believe God has a plan for all of us—each and every person. It is calculated and perfect. We are all pieces of a gigantic, universal jigsaw puzzle. And we all fit together.

The so-called broken pieces of you or your life, or those parts of you you believe are busted, are in fact the very essential components of God’s masterpiece mosaic of you. We have no broken parts of us. There’s no such thing. We just think we have broken pieces. We are exactly who and what we are supposed to be in this perfect, eternal Plan. God’s plan is flawless. There are no accidents, ever.

Everything that has happened to you, that will yet happen to you, every choice that you have made, good or bad—all these events and occurrences have culminated to create you exactly as you are meant to be.

The good parts, the “bad” parts, the broken parts. They are all part of a perfect you.

Why is your life broken? Because you are flawless.