Built From Broken

Covid was the last straw. It had been a relentless three years full of the trials that “make you stronger.” Only I wasn’t stronger. A few months after I had been able to go without supplemental oxygen, I was sitting in the exam room of my doctor’s office. Slow, sorrowful music played, and I felt my soul sink further with every note. I looked out the window at the building next door and saw a large crack hiding behind the store’s sign where the walls met the roof. I was depressed. We are both broken, I thought, and no one knows. I felt bonded with the break in the wall, as if we acknowledged each other’s hidden pain and sorrow. As I thought about what it would take to fix the corner of the store, I was overwhelmed by what it might take to put me back together. As the Doctor entered the room, my current survival plan floated through my mind. Just keep smiling.

Things break in many ways. A sudden force, like a hurricane or a tornado, can cause something in perfect condition to fall. Breaks can also happen over time. A home or building’s foundation weakness can go unnoticed until you see the cracks in the walls or the doors are no longer closing correctly. Something made of glass can have a hairline crack and then explode into many pieces at the slightest touch. Putting broken pieces back together is often complicated, and the outcomes vary. But building back from broken doesn’t just apply to things; it also applies to people. 

After months of being careful and following the guidelines to keep myself and others safe. Covid found a way into my lungs, wreaking havoc. I was admitted to the hospital twice for an accumulative stay of 16 days, eleven of those days spent by myself in isolation. With the help of good doctors and nurses and medications, I can’t count or pronounce, my asthmatic lungs fought for my life.  At the end of the battle, they were tired, worn out, and damaged. Covid caused breathing issues, pneumonia, and an out-of-control immune response. 

During my discharge visit for my second hospital stay, my doctor told me to expect bad days. They were going to come. He explained that it didn’t mean I wasn’t healing or that I was going to have a relapse—it was just a bad day. Some days, I got up; others, I stayed in bed and slept. Both helped me heal. 

On the days I stayed in bed, I enjoyed watching a TV show called The Repair Shop, in which family heirlooms are restored by a team of master craftsmen and women. I identified with the old and broken items brought in for repair. Seeing the items lovingly brought back to life by the team of experts was therapeutic. They took their time and worked slowly and methodically, matching each restoration task to those with the most expertise.

One of my favorite episodes involved the restoration of a 1900’s Underwood typewriter. What was once a quick and efficient machine the owner’s grandfather used as a war correspondent was now damaged by time and misuse. The once shiny black paint of the outer shell was now dull with age and layers of dirt. The type bars were bent and no longer moved when the craftsman pushed down the corresponding letter keys. The ribbon was old and brittle, and the return bar, margin bell, and other parts now only served as decorations on a once well-loved, functional machine. Because parts were no longer available, a complete restoration of the typewriter would be required in the craftsman’s hands.

Bringing the typewriter to its former functional glory seemed an overwhelming and tedious task. But for the craftsman, it was a labor of love. He carefully took the typewriter apart, laying the pieces on his table in order, and then lovingly repaired and cleaned each piece before putting the typewriter back together.

The paint, freed from its layers of dirt, shone again—not like new, but with a beauty that only age and experience can bring to a piece. I lay in bed and cried with the master craftsman as the owner gleefully typed with their grandfather’s typewriter again. 

Like the typewriter, I needed time and the help of others to heal. Sometimes, recovery is slow. There is no hurrying it.

Being built from broken requires going through the storm before the calm. We face the darkness before the light. Seeing any vision of a healing path in those dark moments can be challenging. It may take courage we don’t think we possess, a perspective currently hidden from our view, or an understanding of life events we don’t yet have. It also takes an amount of time we can’t predict.

My husband took a month off work to help me recover, and then some of my children came out to help me so he could return to work.

Friends and family made sure I knew I was not alone. I had doctors, counselors, and medication. I also had the Savior, Jesus Christ, who, through His Atonement, heals. My experience added to the patina of my soul. It changed me. In the healing, my broken body and heart changed my perspective forever. 

Sometimes, being built from broken can transform us into something new—something we never imagined we could be. 

I hired a stained-glass artist to create a piece for my front door. While choosing the glass for my design, she told me about a large sheet of the most beautiful yellow glass she had ever seen. It was so exquisite that she said she just couldn’t cut it. She placed it carefully against the window in front of her shop.

One morning, she went to her shop and found that the beautiful piece of glass had shattered into hundreds of pieces. Devastated at her loss, she picked up the pieces, put them into a box, and put the box in her workroom in the back, where it sat untouched.

As time passed, she received a commission from a local church for a stained-glass window. She drew out the pattern depicting Jesus standing on the edge of a stream. Laying out the pattern on her workbench, she began working with various colors and shapes of glass. She completed the stream, trees, grass, and the Savior. All that was left was the design of the sky.  What she thought would be the simplest to design left her frustrated. Nothing worked, no matter how she looked at the window or how often she sorted through her glass. So, she set it aside for a few days.

One morning in the early dawn hours, she woke up with a start, jumped out of bed, and got dressed. Her husband asked her what she was doing, and she said, “I know what to do with the sky.” She went to her shop and pulled out the box of broken yellow glass.

She carried the box to the table and laid out each piece of glass, creating a ray of light from over Jesus’ head up to the heavens. When she had laid down the last piece, she noticed that the box was empty. Except for minor trimming, every broken piece fit as if she were placing pieces into a puzzle. The only proof the glass had shattered was the yellow dust covering her hand.

The glass had the honor of being the centerpiece in a pictorial testimony of Christ. If we could ask the glass if the pain of being broken was worth the joy of being used for such a beautiful purpose, what would it say?  We tend to focus only on the breaking when we go through the storm. It takes faith to hand over the broken pieces of our lives to God. We trust that His imagination and perspective are more profound and broader than ours. In the aftermath of the storm, it is hard to believe that He is working with us, reshaping us, putting our puzzle pieces together, and making something new of us. But He is, and He does.

Some things are so changed in the breaking that they will never be the same. But in the change, we can find strength and purpose.

My lungs took the longest to heal from Covid. To aid in their recovery, I began walking at the college campus in my town, where a beautiful old tree grows along the route I walk every day. The tree was not planted but grew before it became part of Harding University's campus. The paths and buildings built around it acknowledge its prior claim to the ground on which it stood. The weight of one of the large, thick limbs stretched over the pathway had caused the tree to lean and the trunk to bend and twist. The pull from the weight of this limb on the tree trunk was one reason why the mighty tree split down the middle one stormy night in the early fall. Each side twisted away from the other and fell on their backs to the ground, now only joined by the unseen roots. 

The fall moved some limbs that were previously parallel to the ground upright. Other limbs came crashing down, breaking at odd angles, leaving debris all over the ground where the tree had once stood and spilling onto the walkway.  

Caution tape around the tree and the path pushed people back to a safe distance. Mourners gathered, and people took pictures of the fallen giant. The large leaves, which had immediately withered after the fall, turned brown and died. I waited for the chainsaws to come.

During the next few days, the college groundskeepers cleaned up the broken branches, limbs, and stems on the path. They trimmed the fallen limbs so that the end of the tree’s arms, shortened by their fall, rested gently on the ground. They dumped mulch over the exposed roots. A few days after that, large poles with cradles on top were put under some of the largest and most vulnerable branches that, because of the split, no longer had any support and would soon have been pulled down by gravity. They took down the caution tape, and the path again opened to foot traffic.  

As days turned weeks into months, the two halves of the tree lay on the ground. Talk on campus centered around the desperate measures to keep the tree alive.

“It’s over,” people said. “There is no coming back from that.”

Others shook their heads at the college's folly. “What are they doing? Do they think this tree will live?”

“Give it up,” they said.  The tree is dead.”

The first leaves of the spring’s crop started leafing out by the end of April and covered the tree by May. The tree was not dead but changed. Against the knowledge and love of those whose job was to care for the tree, the opinions of others did not matter. The groundskeepers knew the tree, and they knew what to do. Because of their care, the tree did not die, and in its adaptation to change, they erected a beautiful monument to resilience and adapting to life's storms.  

Some wounds do not fully heal. Some sorrows nest in our hearts, and some experiences change us in ways that don’t allow us to put our lives back together the same way. The two halves of the tree will never grow back together and will always need support to hold up the fallen limbs. But still, it lives. 

One of the broken arms that fell to the ground across the footpath has an upward curve at just the right spot, creating a beautiful arch over the path to walk under. Even with our scars showing, we can grow again, flourish, and stand as a testament to our resilience and our ability to use the changes to ourselves in new and beautiful ways.

Dichotomies are connected contradictions. The pivotal roles of these opposite pairs pull us back and forth, competing for our attention and focus. The bitter takes from us the sweet. The birth of a baby, who reminds us of life’s possibilities, hides the death that will eventually come. Darkness covers the light, while even the smallest of light dispels the darkness.

Despair and hope are another pairing. Despair keeps our minds and hearts centered on the hurt and encourages bitterness, anger, and blame, with guilt as the anchor. Despair whispers that hope is a vague promise that carries no guarantees and offers no proof or assurance of any outcome we desire. It makes us feel as if the faith required to hope takes away strength needed elsewhere.  

 Despair over the tree caused some to see only what was lost when hope would have looked forward to what it could be. Despair over the loss of the whole pane of glass caused the artist to put it away in a box when hope would have begun planning the pivotal part the pieces would play in a work of art. Despair over my health caused me to limit my vision of recovery when hope could have allowed me to think of a time when I would be whole again.

 Whether repurposed, restored, or changed, the process of being built from broken is as individual as we are. But critical for everyone is the healing thread of hope that weaves its way through our journey.

Hope whispers, “There will be a brighter day,” as it displaces despair, showing us a path of light, possibilities, and optimism anchored by faith.  

“Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops - at all...”   Emily Dickinson