A lie waits until you are alone to speak.
It tells you that you are too far gone. That other people are worth mending, but you are the exception. Too much water under the bridge, too many failures, too many years of the same struggle you swore you would beat. The lie does not scream. It just sits quietly in the back of the room and says, “not you.”
We need to call that what it is. It is a lie, and it has never once come from God.
Look at who God builds His kingdom out of. A murderer named Moses. An adulterer named David. A coward named Peter who denied he even knew Jesus, three times, out loud, on the worst night of his life. God did not scrape these people off and start over with better material. He met them in the wreckage and made something out of exactly that.
Peter is the one so much like each of us. After the denials, after the rooster crowed and he wept, he must have been sure he had disqualified himself for good. And Jesus, risen, cooked him breakfast on a beach and gave him his calling back three times, one for each denial (John 21:15-17). That is not a God who throws away broken things. That is a God who restores them on purpose.
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” (Psalm 147:3, BSB)
Binds up. Like a doctor who does not walk past the worst injury in the room but kneels down next to it. Your brokenness is not a reason He keeps His distance. It is the reason He came close.
Grace does something the lie never mentions. It does not wait for you to become less broken first. It meets you as you are, today, in the middle of the very thing you are ashamed of, and it calls you His anyway.
You are not too broken. You are exactly the kind of person the gospel was written for. The cracks you have been hiding are not proof you are beyond repair. In the hands of the God who binds up wounds, they are simply where the light shines out.
You're Not Too Broken