God’s love, mercy will put us back together again
I will never forget the day that I broke my son’s heart over lunch. Truly, he was laying on the floor at my feet, weeping as though the world was going to end. What happened? Well, I cut Finn’s sandwich in half.
When he requested a sandwich for lunch, I thought that was certainly something I could handle. That is, until I cut the sandwich straight down, instead of at an angle.
Fix it, he screamed at the top of his lungs as he threw himself on the floor. Amid the wailing, I knew this wasn’t a time for reasoning. Thankfully, that wasn’t the last of the bread and so I started over, making the sandwich as Finn wiped his tears and gave me the proper instruction on how to cut a sandwich.
Finn soon forgot about the tragedy we had endured together, but as I ate the broken sandwich, it made me think about all the times we unintentionally and intentionally hurt each other. Sometimes hearts really are broken from things that we say or do and our own heart is sometimes broken from things said or done to us. And no matter how much someone else begs us to fix it – we cannot.
Today is Ash Wednesday, a day we are called to remember all the hearts we have broken, intentionally or not.
We recall the moments we have wished we could fix things and make them right, and yet we could not. We are reminded of our limits, our sins, and our frailty. With ashes on our forehead, we remember there are simply some things we cannot fix. More often than not, matters of life and death are out of our hands.
Today, and every day, we must return to God, who is the source of our life. God assures us that through Jesus, all that we have broken, all that we have cut in half, WILL be put back together again through God’s love and mercy.
On that day, it was no time to try to convince Finn that his sandwich would taste the same no matter which direction I cut it. The best option was to start over. And it turns out, that was the way to fix it for him. That is the way Jesus comes to us, too, in forgiveness. Through God’s forgiveness, we start over with a clean slate.
