It is the strangest beauty.
A person, broken by addiction or pain or tragedy or life-altering sin, suffers and strays and seems hopelessly far from freedom and then, either little by little or all at once finds breakthrough and release and...Christ.
Inch by inch he, or she, stays free, one moment at a time, then a day, then many days strung together like twinkle lights shining in their once dark world.
Is it that set of lights that warms God's heart the most? The life that was once nearly as broken as Christ's body on the cross and now set free with the same love available to every one of us.
But wait, do we realize that each of us is as broken as the person we imagined in the second line? If not by our outward circumstances, our thoughts are broken with envy, smoldering grudges, boredom and discontent.
We can't escape the brokenness. But we can become part of that strangest beauty. We can surrender even our thoughts to this love that frees, that stood broken Itself on a wooden cross.
When we see ourselves truly aligned with that very brokenness, we somehow become aligned with true freedom.
It is the strangest beauty.
