Beauty Through Brokenness
- Han
- Jun 29, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 4, 2020
“We are hit with the reality of this life over and over again. We cling to flower crowns, festivals, cotton candy and dancing in parks because we have to if we have any chance of forging through it. We get hyped on cake and adoption because if we don’t, we fear the darkness will swallow us. We fight for justice, we advocate for and shout the worth of the voiceless, and we never cease to cheer them on. We laugh big and love bigger. We tickle and kiss and rock to sleep, we push and fight for what is good. We fall and get back up. So when the words, “this has been such a great day!” are met with “we just lost another soul”, we can walk into that gut wrenching darkness with a little bit of light still in us. We imagine wholeness, see the fatherless no more, we pray for comfort and peace and we rejoice in the moments shared. To have known and be known, loved and been loved. We choose hope. We cling to it as tightly as we can.”
Beauty Through Brokenness. What does that really mean? It sounds pretty straight forward: 'good things can come out of bad’. This isn’t exactly my experience or thoughts on it, so I’ll attempt to navigate this space with you and examine the phrase more closely. I have not by any means ‘solved’ or ‘fully understand’ any of these topics I write about: grief, hope, healing. This is merely my journey through them, and these writings are my way of processing them.
Something I’ve had a lot of experience with up until this point is learning that it’s possible to be both happy and sad at the same time. Not only that, it’s possible to be overjoyed and absolutely heartbroken at the same time. It maybe seems as though you couldn’t possibly be that heartbroken if you’re still celebrating in the same breath. In my experience, it's very possible. I can tell you for a fact that I have been on the ground in utter devastation, and only moments later been found laughing, cheering or dancing. Beauty through brokenness doesn't mean the broken parts disappear, it means you are carrying the weight of both, always. It's a constant tension between victory and defeat, anger and love, joy and sorrow. Hearts can be broken and still feel joy.
"And maybe that was how it was supposed to be...Joy and sadness were part of the package; the trick, perhaps, was to let yourself feel all of it, but to hold on to the joy just a little more tightly." --Kristin Hannah
One of my examples of this is adoption. Adoption is born out of brokenness: there is no story of adoption that doesn’t begin with loss. That doesn’t go away, and it brings with it the tender and personal stories of individual sorrow. Most of us are aware of the loss in adoption. In my particular experience, adoption meant a lot of grief--experiencing it and witnessing it. It meant another goodbye. Adoption was first met with overwhelming excitement and praise, pure joy and tangible hope. It was shortly met with the realization of another separation, and another unknown. It was met with crippling fear and confusion. I witnessed this and didn’t know how to navigate the emotions--how could I when I was feeling them too, in my own way? In the smallest of comparisons, adoption meant grief for me as well (I’ll be writing a post specifically about the never-ending goodbyes that expats go through, and I’ll touch on this more then). Adoption meant another change, another loss, another unknown. How could I be a source of comfort in those moments of great change? How could I teach what awaits on the other side? How would I explain the safety, security and love of a family when there is nothing to compare it to? How could I describe what an airplane is, what a new language is, what culture shock is? The truth is, I couldn't. It’s nearly impossible to prepare someone for their world to turn upside down. So we celebrated calmly and prepared slowly. We spoke positively, being careful to never belittle or minimize fear, uncertainty, or questions. We spoke of the sunlight through the darkness as we cautiously tread through the water and into the unknown. We dried their tears and prayed for peace as we held each other’s hands and walked forward in hope that the story would bloom in beauty.
In the unknown, the fear, the grief, we saw glimmers of beauty. In the pain of spending yet another Christmas separated from our families and witnessing yet another Christmas of children without one, we found beauty in community. We found joy in little thumbprint ornaments, decorating cookies and singing carols of hope in Chinese. In the sorrow of another loss, we found hope in sweet memories of handprints on canvas and stories of laughter. In the overwhelming brokenness of a country we cared for, we found beauty in peonies, big festivals and sweet conversation. In the pain and sick, we found beauty in smiles and hands squeezed around fingers. In desperate times of feeling lost and forgotten, we saw beauty in friendship, song and hugs.
In the brokenness of children without families, we found beauty in hope.
“You make beautiful things out of the dust...you make beautiful things out of us”
There is a pottery technique originated in Japan called Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery")--side note; how fun is the word, joinery? They take broken pottery and instead of throwing it away or remaking it, they glue it back together, and overtop of the glue they cover it with a dusting of powdered gold. Rather than hiding the cracks, they are literally illuminated. "As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise." How beautiful is that image? If we treated our broken parts, our scars, and our history not as something to shy away from, hide, or try to 'fix'--but instead, 'dust them with gold', wear them proudly, and say, "this was broken and it's still a part of me, but I've found something beautiful in it and I want to share it with you." I try to take this and apply it to my life: by reflecting on my own story of brokenness and looking at the beauty that is woven through it. I don't want to lose the parts of my story that have played such an important role in my life, making me who I am today. I don't want to 'throw them away' and pretend they didn't happen or 'start anew'. I want to pick them up, glue them back together, and proudly share my story of brokenness, sorrow, and the 'gold' that holds me together.
Our life in China was never not about experiencing both beauty and brokenness simultaneously. Everywhere you looked you saw it. It was in our personal lives, our work, our community, our home. It was in every person that lived and worked alongside us and every child we loved. It was the very reason we were all brought together--for without brokenness, there would be no clinging to hope.
Beautiful Things | Gungor
All this pain I wonder if I'll ever find my way I wonder if my life could really change, at all All this earth Could all that is lost ever be found? Could a garden come out from this ground, at all?
You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us
All around, Hope is springing up from this old ground Out of chaos life is being found, in you
You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us Oh, you make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us
You make me new, You are making me new You make me new, You are making me new (Making me new)
You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us Oh, you make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of the dust You make beautiful things You make beautiful things out of us
You make me new, You are making me new You make me new, You are making me new
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