as humans: in relation to God, in relation to others, and in relation to ourselves.
When we think of our brokenness theologically, most commonly we think about our brokenness in relation to God. For many of us, it is true. We feel our brokenness in relation to God deeply; we feel alienated and distant from God. We experience immense guilt for our sin and our incapacity to overcome it. And we are desperate to experience the free forgiveness of God and the righteousness Christ hands us, which we could never attain for ourselves. In short, we are desperate to experience restoration to God.
However, this is not the case for everyone. Others may feel their brokenness most intensely in relationship to others. This is especially true for those of us who ache and grieve over the injustice of the world. We feel
the pain of the oppressed and the marginalized deeply in our bones, whether it is because we have lived it ourselves or because our hearts are broken and our indignation ignited by the atrocities we witness in our world. In short, we are most devasted by the sins we commit against one another.
Finally, there are still others of us who feel our brokenness most intensely in terms of relating to ourselves. This can be experienced as a deep sense of worthlessness that we carry everywhere we go. It can be a sense of insufficiency or inferiority that we live with, or it can be the enduring and intransigent suffering of mental illness— our battles with depression, anxiety, compulsion, addiction, disassociation, and the like. We feel the pain of these and the pain they inflict on our lives. We may at times hate ourselves, or wonder why we have to be the way we are. Why can ' t we fix it? Why won ' t
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