Putting It Back Together
It was a great Easter Sunday. The sanctuary on the hill on College Street was filled with folks as we celebrated the Resurrection of our Lord. We heard God’s praises sung. We heard the great truth that in the Resurrection of Christ, God has conquered evil and vanquished death. We delighted in the baptisms and confirmations.
It was also great to see some of our college kids who were home visiting mom and dad. Some had new boyfriends and girlfriends in tow. A few folks made their way back to church for the first time in many months after enduring an illness.
After the benediction, my wife, daughter and I dined with a number of members of our church family and enjoyed a fantastic meal. Later, my sister and her husband drove over from Augusta to visit for a couple of hours.
After the departure of my sister and brother-in-law, I settled in to watch the Duke-Louisville game in the NCAA basketball tournament. I began watching the game wishing there was a way they could both lose.
I suppose in as much as Duke is a Methodist institution I should pull for them but Coach Mike Krzyzewski and the gang just seem so arrogant that I find it difficult to like them. As for Louisville, their coach Rick Pitino administered a few beatings to my Georgia Bulldogs when he was coach at Kentucky making it difficult to pull for his team as well.
Unless one has been under a rock one knows what happened in the game. With around six minutes to go in the first half Louisville’s Kevin Ware made an attempted block of a Duke three-point shot. He came down and broke his leg. One could see the leg bend in an unnatural fashion. It was a sickening sight. Later it was revealed that the bone was actually protruding through the skin.
I’ve seen a lot of sports injuries through the years both in person and on television. This might have been the most gruesome I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of the time Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Thiesman’s leg in a similar manner on Monday Night Football back in 1983.
It also brought to mind the night when I was 11 years of age. My Dad was playing a little pick-up basketball with some of the church kids in the church youth center one Sunday evening. Dad had been a pretty good high school hoopster back in the day and always enjoyed playing basketball with me on our backyard goal.
This night at the church he went up for mid-range jumper, came down on his leg and fell to the floor. One could hear the bone snap. While the bone didn’t protrude through the skin one did not need an x-ray to tell that the bone was broken.
A surgeon put a pin in my Dad’s bone placing it back together and to my knowledge it didn’t bother him much after the cast was removed. Kevin Ware had surgery to repair his broken leg (actually he broke his tibia) and is expected to make a full recovery. Ware’s injury inspired his Louisville teammates and they dominated Duke to advance to the Final Four.
There are an awful lot of things in life that can be broken. Of course one can break legs and arms. We can also break things like glass and china. I’ve broken my share of things like that. A friend once told me that I “could break an anvil with a rubber hammer.”
The list of things that can be broken extends far beyond bones or inanimate objects. Sadly, we have all observed broken people. There are times in life that people can be broken by unfortunate experiences, tragic circumstances or their personal bad choices. The truth is there is lot of brokenness in many lives.
One of the great truths that we learn from the Resurrection is that God can put things back together. On Good Friday the world was broken. Jesus, the Son of God, had been put to death. It seemed that evil had triumphed. Yet, with the Resurrection God put the world back together again. Hope emerged from despair. Forgiveness emerged from sin. Life emerged from death. All was put together.
Dear reader, if there is something broken in your life, whatever it may be, I challenge you to place it in the hands of the one who can fix what is broken. God is waiting to put it all back together.