True You By Michelle DeRushaSample

Day Four: Facing Your Brokenness

Scripture: Psalm 34:18, 51:16-17, Isaiah 57:15

I had arrived in Italy for a ten-day spiritual writers’ retreat. As I settled in, wearied and spent from travel, only one sentence filled my journal that morning: “I don’t have rest in my life because I don’t have rest in God.” And with that single sentence, everything became devastatingly, heartbreakingly clear. 

I didn’t have clarity in my vocation, in my calling as a writer, because I didn’t know who I was in God. And I didn’t know who I was in God because I didn’t know God himself. In an instant I knew in my heart, mind, and marrow that everything, everything, begins with our relationship with God. And in an instant my heart broke, because I knew the truth: I didn’t know God.

I thought I’d come to Tuscany to find answers to my vocational unrest and to refill my creative and spiritual wells. But the truth revealed to me was that I’d come to Tuscany to recognize, confront, and name my deepest brokenness. I still wrestled with deep questions of doubt and even, at times, with unbelief, and I still struggled fiercely in my faith.

I am a master at deception, and there is no one I have deceived more than myself. I refused to face my deepest flaws and my darkest sins because I was afraid they were unforgivable and made me unredeemable and unlovable. Again, like Adam and Eve, I hid among the trees. The dense foliage of my life—busyness, distraction, social media, my to-do list, and, above all, my striving to achieve, succeed, and please—protected me from my deepest self, from both my sins and my desires. Like the bleeding woman, I told my story—I confessed—only when I was called out and could stay hidden no more.

I couldn’t bring myself to face the fact that even after my return to faith, even after writing a whole book about that journey back to God, even after pursuing a career and calling as a Christian writer, I still wrestled with doubt and unbelief. I couldn’t name it, not only because acknowledging my struggle made me feel like a complete and utter fraud, but also because while my deepest desire was to know God, my deepest fear was that to know him was impossible.

Sit quietly for a few minutes and allow the hope of Isaiah 57:15 to enter your heart and mind: “I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.”