Broken

I believe that as we are all broken in some way or another and that it is only by the grace of God that we are saved.

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I think as Christians we have a tendency to forget that we are all equal in our brokenness.  I read a post a while ago by Annie over at what she saw that really takes this idea home for me.  She is talking about how we see other peoples sins (brokenness) as worse than our own and then judge them for it.  Crazy right? You can check it out here if you are interested.

But that is not what I really want to talk about today.  I want to talk about the fact that we as Christians also have the saddest tendency to go the other way, to swing to the other extreme.  We get so focused on our own brokenness that we forget that the people around us are broken too!

What I mean by that is that we get so caught up in wanting to fix ourselves and 'oh I need prayer for this', and 'oh God help me',  that we forget to really open our eyes and see the people around us, our brothers and sisters in Christ that need that help or that prayer too!  I am not saying that they need it more than we do by any means; but we are supposed to be a body, and a body is in trouble when each part just decides that it is going to do its own thing!

I was having a conversation with my mom about something different the other day and she said something that really stuck with me:  She said that we all spend too much time on just looking out for ourselves and that if everyone just looked out for everyone else, we would have more people helping us way better than we could ever help ourselves.

And that does not just apply to Christians, it applies to everyone that you meet in your day.  We as humans need to care about people other than ourselves.

In our culture it is so easy to just focus on yourself and your own problems and forget to look around you.  It doesn't even require that much effort,  just a smile or a 'how are you' that you really mean.

And the thing is that yes we are all broken.  But just because something is broken doesn't mean it isn't beautiful.  And, in helping someone else you might just find that you take that part of you that is broken and turn it into something better than it was before.

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