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“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”

Posted: Tue, Apr 16, 2019
“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.” ~ Ernest Hemingway Resurrection is not resuscitation. Resurrection is new life. Healing is not being restored to where you have been. Healing is being made into something new. This is not a time of mere change. This is a time of transformation. [...]

Rev. Dr. Steven Koski

“The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
Resurrection is not resuscitation. Resurrection is new life.
Healing is not being restored to where you have been. Healing is being made into something new.
This is not a time of mere change. This is a time of transformation.
I am struck today by a line in Maya Spector’s beautiful Spring poem called Jailbreak that says, “Lose your determination to remain unchanged. All the forces of nature want you to open.”
Mary Oliver wrote, “Books, bricks, grief – it’s not the weight but how you carry it.” What if the weight you carry was not a burden weighing you down but the one thing making you stronger in the broken places? Are you willing to loosen your grip on the life you assumed was yours to receive the new life that is waiting as a gift unopened?
Here’s the whole poem. May your soul be ready to receive its invitation:
“It’s time to break out – Jailbreak time.
Time to punch our way out of the dark winter prison.
Lilacs are doing it in sudden explosions of soft purple. And the jasmine vines, and ranunculus, too.
There’s no jailer powerful enough to hold Spring contained.
Let that be a lesson. Stop holding back the blossoming!
Quit shutting eyes and gritting teeth, curling fingers into fists, hunching shoulders.
Lose your determination to remain unchanged.
All the forces of nature want you to open, their gentle nudge carries behind it the force of a flash flood.
Why make a cell your home when the door is unlocked and the garden is waiting for you?”