This piece of creative writing is a reflection on our own brokenness, and an encouragement to look towards Jesus, the man of sorrows who meets us in our places of disappointment. It was inspired by an idea by Rob Bell, from Chapter 1 of his book Drops Like Stars.


Extract from the reflection:

We live in the corridors. We'd like to inhabit the rooms off it, the places of pleasure and peace and harmony and happiness. The rooms of light and wholeness and satisfaction. But we find ourselves pacing the stretches that link these places. We do get to visit the rooms of our choice at times, for longer or shorter periods. We slip into the rooms of sport, creativity, music, dancing, learning, science, laughter, love, parties and friendship. We spend time in the places where things are working well and life begins to feel as it should. But then we find ourselves outside again. And more, we're in those other rooms, the places of heartbreak and disease. The rooms of frustration and sadness, anger and suspicion. The rooms no one chooses to enter. And so we find our lives weaving between these places, our steps sometimes nicely ordered and our plans and purposes intact, at other times we lurch out of step, chaotic, bumbling, barely limping along.

Easy to imagine that, as Christians, our lives should be a little more ordered, and that we are somehow able to spend more time in the positive rooms, the places of light and love and laughter. Not for us the rooms of heartache and heartbreak, surely we are more victorious, more accomplished. Aren't we? And yet we find ourselves drifting in those corridors as much as anyone else, sometimes in the rooms of hope and healing, but often in those dark and difficult rooms too, those places of pain and imperfection. And there, in the shadowy corners, we see someone else. A man with holes in his body, the marks of weakness and sacrifice, the one whose body bears the brunt of those sad places...

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