Can't Be Fixed?

"At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail." Job 14:7

Can't be fixed: a child's face stares bleakly up at me over the plastic shards of a shattered toy.

Can't be fixed: the giant oak lies among the hurricane's debris, it's roots upended helplessly.

Can't be fixed: the man and the woman stare across the distance between them, shocked into silence by brutal words finally uttered.

Some things in life can be patched up, shored up, repaired or redone. But some wounds are too grievous, some blows too shattering, some rifts too wide to be pulled back together. Some experiences - a divorce, a betrayal, abuse, neglect - leave us permanently wounded, our psyches disfigured. We live, we go on, but we're not really fixed.

Yet I believe there is an alternate plan for things that can't be fixed. It won't work for shattered plastic, but this plan can make an astonishing difference in living, growing things like trees and people. I've seen it in a new shoot growing from a shattered stump, in the faces of a couple whose counseling sessions are finally showing some progress. I've seen it in people who have hit bottom and admitted their own helplessness, only to begin growing again from there.

As far as I can see, God's strategy for broken trees and limbs and lives and souls is not repair but growth; not being patched up but being granted the gift to start over:

Can't be fixed - but can be reborn.
Can't be fixed - but can be made new.

By Anne Christian Buchanan, taken from "Women's Devotional Bible 2"