I am chronically clumsy, self-diagnosed.

  Symptoms include continual tripping over my own feet, spilling things on the daily, and somehow breaking at least a handful of mugs each and every year. It follows me everywhere from my phone needing an extra protective case, to my hands carrying scars from knives getting away from me while cooking. 

  It's been a descriptor that I've carried all my life, being clumsy. As a child my parents tried to train me to avoid these accidents, but years later my sweet mother still winces every-time she hears a shatter during one of our phone calls.

  Now as an adult I spend much time seeking a cure for my clumsiness. Berating myself for rushing too fast every time another shirt of mine ends up with a picturesque splatter of espresso across it. 

  This morning as my eyes filled with frustrated tears at another massacred coffee on the ground I realized that I despised my clumsiness because it proves that I am not perfect and never will be. 

  I don't like being someone who can only produce broken things. I want to be put together, poised, and balanced. I don't like to be faced with my flaws, my imperfections, and deepest selfish desires. We all live in a world that doesn't know what to do with broken things. 

  I realized that God, with His hilarious humor, puts a visual picture of my inability to be anything other than perfect in from of my face almost daily. My clumsiness has now become a picture of my own brokenness and my desperate need for Him to make me new. 

    It also reminds me of how little control I truly have over my life. I don't want or mean to trip and break things, but it somehow happens. In life I would love for everything to go the way I want, but it doesn't. Life can change in the blink of an eye, but that confusion and unknowing is what pushes us to trust and rely more and more in Christ.

    If I had it all figured out there I wouldn't need Him. 

   So the next time I'm carefully throwing away glass shards or nursing my wounded toe that I stubbed, it'll be a reminder that God just so happens to be a professional at making broken things new.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.  That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

                                                                                            2 Corinthians 12:9-10