Brokenness and Healing

Being an English major was a wonderful thing. I mean, telling people you're an English major was never fun because they would inevitably scrunch up their noses or ask if you were planning on teaching high school. But, actually being an English major was great.

You see, while other people had their noses stuck in boring books about business or chemistry, I was poring over Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Thackeray. In short, I got to read books that people actually want to read. But, being an English major wasn't just about reading literature; it was also about trying to understand literature, trying to get at why an author made a certain choice or trying to search for hidden meanings.

One of the exercises for doing that was the literary close reading. Close reading is perhaps the most left-brained approach to literature, so it might come as some surprise that I absolutely loved it. In doing a close reading, you look to every little writing choice an author has made. You ask things like: Why is that comma there? Why has she used the word "love" ten times? Why is the word "truth" capitalized?

Exciting stuff, right?

Well, perhaps it's not the most intriguing or romantic way of looking at literature, but you can learn a lot by the choices an author makes. You can try to figure out what is most important to the author, how the author understands his subject, what the author wants you to get. This hit me the other day as I was reading through Psalms. I came to a verse that I really like. It says,

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." (Psalm 147:3).

What stood out to me was the similarity of this verse to two verses that I like in Job. Job 5:17-18 says,

"Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal."

What stands out here is that there is a theme of brokenness. However, that theme of brokenness does not stand on it's own; rather, it is joined with the theme of healing, of binding up. What's striking is that this really is the whole Bible story, the story of a broken people who have the opportunity to turn to God, repent, and be healed.

It's not just these two verses. We see this theme of a God who will bind up our wounds running throughout the Bible, starting with the Fall and, of course, in the coming of Christ and the crucifixion. If we look all throughout the Old and New Testaments, we see the theme.

We even see it in the short but terrifying book of Zephaniah. The other day, I was talking to my uncle, and he pointed out a verse from Zephaniah which speaks to this very point. In Zephaniah, amid a book in which God was pouring out well-deserved punishment on His people, we get Zephaniah 3:17 which says,

"The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."

Isn't that an amazing picture, to think of God delighting in us, to think of God singing over us as we might sing over a child who is crying? But, again, this is the theme that runs throughout the Bible. We don't have to undertake a close reading to find these themes. We learn, without looking too closely, that despite our sins, despite our faults, God is there, waiting for us to let Him bind our wounds, even those wounds we've brought on ourselves.

Because the themes of brokenness and healing run throughout the Bible, it is not surprising to learn that we are broken, nor is it surprising to learn that God will heal our brokenness. What is surprising is that we don't turn away from those things which hurt us and toward a God who heals. What is surprising is that we don't let ourselves be healed, that we don't listen for His singing, that we don't let our broken hearts and selves be bound.