[truth.dawning]

The sleep-induced fog was slowly lifting and I could hear their voices. The pain-laced sound pierced my tiredness.

“I know I’m not good enough.”

He said it and I know it, that feeling of defeat. The ache of past mistakes and the pain of an altered future. I know them.

I turn, slowly waking as my husband’s voice joins the conversation.

“What is truth?” He says and the two men stare at each other.

It’s the question we’ve been facing. The one we’ve been looking through scripture to answer. We feel things. We know things. But what is truth?

I listen as it comes. The words swirling around my kitchen and living room. Real words.

The carefully pulled apart truth that echoes and sings. 

“What makes you think you’re not good enough?” The question is asked. And he speaks of broken relationships and generations of hurt and divorce and fear.

Then the dawning of truth.

He says it hesitantly but his voice strengthens as he finishes. “If it hadn’t been for my dad rejecting me, I would have lived my whole life as a ‘good’ person. I wouldn’t have gone to church that first time. I wouldn’t have listened. I wouldn’t have needed anything. I wouldn’t have chosen Jesus.”

Then they sit and read Scripture together, these men of God. Reading about Moses and the way that God used brokenness to make him whole. The grasping at promises that God takes broken people and uses them. In fact, he only uses broken people.

If we want to be His, if we want to be whole, if we want truth then we’re going to break. And we’re going to hurt. And none of us, not a single one, will be “good enough”.

But that is where the truth starts dancing.

…for all have sinned and fall short

Of the glory of God,

And are justified freely by his grace

Though the redemption that came

By Christ Jesus.

Romans 3:23-24

And my heart clenches with joy. Because I’m sitting in the same room with two men who are broken, who are redeemed by His grace and who are reflecting Christ—and that is amazing.