Shortly after we moved into the house we bought here in St. Louis, we discovered that we needed a lawnmower. Previously, we had been renters and each of the places we rented had provided us with a mower. Rather than letting my lawn grow to knee length, I decided to buy my very first lawnmower. Now, I am a little bit of a tightwad when it comes to cash, so I opted for the hundred dollar mower from Wal-Mart. After all, a lawnmower is a lawnmower –they all have motor that turns a blade that cuts the grass. For the first year the thing worked great. It started every time and the grass got cut.
Fall rolled in, like it does every year, and dropped mountains of leaves on my yard. My neighbor has two, very large, very old Oak trees –one in the front yard and one in the back yard. Their ability to drop foliage is prodigious. My neighbor’s trees drop leafs like Justin Bieber annoys adolescent and adult males everywhere. Raking was just not an option. Our hundred dollar mower looked like it was up for the challenge of mincing up these leaves. It actually did a rather good job, that is, until the very end. As I was mulching up a wet pile trapped between the house and our fence the mower chocked off. The blade was clogged and would no longer move. I rotated the blade to help remove the debris. I must have turned the blade in the wrong direction because oil began to flow from the engine. I thought, “No big deal, let’s see if it’ll start.” It did. I finished the pile with no other interruption.
The next spring I pulled the mower out of the shed, checked the oil, filled the gas tank and started her up. It was obvious from the very beginning that something was not right. Its idle speed was really low. I applied all of my mechanical skill to setting things right. I wiggled things; I unscrewed things and wiggled other things. I replaced the sparkplug. Nothing seemed to work. So, I did what seemed like the most appropriate thing to do; I kept mowing. By this time, the cutting capacity of the mower had now been cut in half. If the grass was of any length it wouldn’t cut. Instead of taking it to someone to have it looked at, I just mowed each row twice –forward and backwards. This seemed to help, at least most of the time. I didn’t mind cutting the lawn twice each week. I needed the exercise.
The theme at Nazarene Youth Conference this last week was UnBroken. God has unbroken our world through the work of Jesus Christ, and God invites us to participate in that mission of un-brokenness. Chris Folmsbee, the speaker for the first night, made this comment: “The Gospel that God calls us to doesn’t just manage brokenness, the Gospel that God calls us to unbreaks it.” Imagine that, God doesn’t just want to help us get through or cope with our brokenness; God wants to undo the damage.
I was trying to manage the brokenness of my hundred dollar mower. Instead of seeking to undo the damage I did to it the previous fall, I tried to make a broken object function like it was originally intended to. It didn’t work. It only frustrated me. It only caused me more work, time and money in gasoline. It’s the same with our lives. We’re broken. All too often we know we are not functioning properly but instead of seeking out the One who can properly unbreak us we try to manage the brokenness. We seek to manage our brokenness in all manner of ways, including asking Jesus to help us manage our lack of functionality. Instead of asking Jesus to completely unbreak us we only ask him to help us make do. It’s like asking a broken mower to function like a brand new one. It only gets half the job done. We think Jesus can fix us without letting him completely invade our lives, without letting him tear our engine apart to find out what is really broken. We want Jesus only to wiggle things here and there in hopes that we’ll run better.
But that’s not what Jesus wants. Jesus wants to unbreak us. Jesus wants to unbreak us so that we can go out and join him on his mission of restoring to wholeness a very broken world.
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