Out of curiosity this morning - I'll get to the reason later - I Googled "total depravity vs. utter depravity." Let me just say, as an at-least-fifth-generation Calvinist, Professor Google does not always provide trustworthy information!
Whether you are contemplating the people around you or the world in which we live, it doesn't take more than 5 minutes of honest observation to realize that everyone and every thing is broken. It also does not take long to realize that there is, alongside the broken, much that is right and good - what Jerram Barrs calls "echoes of Eden" and what Yours Truly refers to as "fingerprints of God" - in the people, places, and circumstances we encounter.
My tiny patient, who is a frail dried husk of tissue-thin skin stretched over protruding bone, who would as soon bite my head off as tell me her name, she has more courage and strength of will than any fairy-tale knight or big-screen super hero ever created. I tell her at least once a week, "I want to be more like you when I grow up."
The man lying in his bed day after day, fighting intense chronic pain as his bones are eaten away by an invisible tormentor - he might have been something of a hellion in his youth, but today, he smiles through his pain when I visit him, and says "Thank you. I appreciate you so much."
It is weird - and beautiful - how death gives strength to the weak and softens the mighty.
Totally broken/fallen/depraved does not equal broken/fallen/depraved to the uttermost.
[Aside - Speaking as someone who once struggled desperately to categorize everyone and everything into categories of black or white, good or bad: If you find yourself also struggling with this tendency, nothing in life is that simple. Beware the compulsion to embrace or promote your own or someone else's person/cause/experience/insight/whatever as Perfectly Good or The Ultimate Evil.]
Anywho, I ran away from home yesterday afternoon, away from the exhausting demands of work and away from the heavy neediness that is the one constant when I get off work and away from the weekend routine of painful chasm and silence to a place where my head and my heart can find quiet and rest. Even in this sweet haven, however, I did not sleep well last night - coffee too late in the day yesterday, to help me push through the end of the work week - but lying awake through the wee hours, I felt loved and safe.
I woke up this morning in our big, beautiful, broken world to birdsong and the soft drip-drip-drip of last night's rain falling from a forest of green leaves, to strong black coffee and waffles and gentle people who handle my heart tenderly.
My life is a total mess. It. Is. So. Broken.
But it is not utterly broken.
It is also so incredibly beautiful.
Thank you, Lord, for birdsong, spring rain, the riot of green outside my window, and rest.
* * * * *
"We are all broken...that's how the light gets in." - Hemingway
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