This past summer Javier Colon won the NBC singing contest The Voice. He is super talented, and I love the single he recorded as his finale for the show, “Stitch by Stitch.”
Here are some of the words:
Blue and black, heart torn out,
You uncover what’s beneath my skin.
There and back, there’s no doubt,
Your touch is my medicine.I’ll be OK , ’cause you heal me;
And I’ll give you all my pieces broken.
In your hands, there’s nothing that you can’t fix.
My heart is frayed, my scars are open,
So put me back together now, stitch by stitch.What you say without words,
Resuscitates what was numb inside.
So repair me, every bit of me,
‘Cause your bringing me back to life.
I was thinking how Christian this theme is: healing touch, new life. But I was also reflecting on my sermon from Sunday on Jacob wrestling with God. God’s touch doesn’t just heal us, it breaks us first. Here is what I said yesterday:
Jesus was broken so that we could be healed.
But we must be broken ourselves before we will grasp the glory of Jesus’ brokenness for us.
To use the metaphor from Javier Colon’s song, he unravels us and then he stitches us back together. He shatters us, then remolds us. Or, as Jared Wilson says in his fantastic book, Gospel Wakefulness, “He razes us before he raises us.”
Brokenness is a blessing, because it brings us to Jesus who was broken for us.
