Quotes & Sayings About Brokenness

Step One is about recognizing our brokenness. — Bill W.

The soft yellow-brown of the son's underclothes looks beautiful when seen in rich harmony with the red of the father's cloak, but the truth of the matter is that the son is dressed in rags that betray the great misery that lies behind him. In the context of a compassionate embrace, our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

When calling for authenticity, we need to take seriously the brokenness and sinfulness of the human heart. If to be authentic means to be who we really are or to express what we really feel, then in most cases I'm going to vote for hypocrisy. Our prisons are filled with men and women who acted on their feelings and impulses. If authenticity is about being true to yourself, these individuals should be our models of inspiration. — Erwin Raphael McManus

He's always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn't take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals' feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys. — Jalina Mhyana

Missional leaders not only feel the burden of God's mission but they also act on the burden and act upon it sacrificially. Leading a missional church is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage to push yourself beyond your comfort zone and to lead the church beyond it personal limits. Brokenness, inner turmoil and sacrifice will always be part of the missional leader's life. — Gary Rohrmayer

God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever. — Vance Havner

The broken can always be fixed — Ricky Maye

We share a reckless, toxic love that feeds the brokenness in me, in us. Our love is an addiction. A love that I won't ever consider living without. — Angie McKeon

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions. — Anne Lamott

Letter 17


Morning. The snow was falling outside. There was a white silence.
My mother and I sat facing my father at the dining room table.

There was something impenetrable about his gaze. It was like pack ice.

And the ice was thickening.

I could barely see into him.

I knew.
And they knew that I knew.

He was broken.

I did not even need to look at him.

I could feel his brokenness all thorough the room. — Gregory Colbert

Despite the way she rallied, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to break him, as lost and lonely as an abandoned child's. — Katherine McIntyre

God will never plant the seed of his life upon the soil of a hard, unbroken spirit. He will only plant that seed where the conviction of his spirit has brought brokenness, where the soil has been watered with the tears of repentance as well as the tears of joy. — Alan Redpath

Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life — Parker J. Palmer

I look around at everybody laughing and joking together and struggle to understand my life has become a living hell that nobody present could even begin to imagine — B.A. Paris

When I come clean about my brokenness, others catch glimpses of how the real grace of a real God works in the messy life of a real person. — Jason Gray

Most people are pleasant when the world is going the way they want. But a person's character can be seen most clearly when the brokenness of the world has invaded his or her peace, when the way he or she thinks things ought to be is interrupted, disrupted, and dismantled. — Matt Chandler

False humility and morbid introspection are, in fact, the opposite of brokenness, as they reveal a preoccupation with self, rather than Christ. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He — Michael Chabon

You would not ask someone with a broken arm to swim the English Channel, so you cannot demand that the broken to live as if they were whole. — John Eldredge

A true Christian will be sensitive to the sin in their life and it will lead them to brokenness and genuine confession, but the person who says they are a Christian and are not sensitive to sin, it does not lead them to confession, a person who is that way is not a Christian. — Paul Washer

I want to be softened, not stiff. Pliable, not rigid. I don't want anyone to look at my life and think it is perfect or, worse, that I want them to think it is perfect. Instead, I want anything that is unapproachable or harsh in me to be scrubbed away by the salt and the sand, revealing the imperfections, the brokenness, the cracks. Not because I am proud of those parts, but because I know it is real. Like the Skin Horse or the Velveteen Rabbit, I am shabby because I live life, because I am loved, and because it is all work - living and loving and being loved, being transformed, being worn and faded — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world ... — Alice Walker

Stepping back and connecting reconciliation to God's story also helps us move away from dramatic visions of fixing the world, as if our job were to provide solutions to problems outside us. If Christians believe anything, it is that no one - including ourselves and the church - is separate from the brokenness as an untainted solution to the problems of our world. The new creation contends with the old. The dividing line between good and evil runs straight through each one of us. So the journey of reconciliation begins with a transformation of the human person. — Chris Rice

Holiness isn't a list of things to do or not do, though - it's a state of being. Holiness is what happens when the broken pieces of our hearts, the brokenness of our lives and the things we do to try to salve that brokenness, are continually turned over to God and left on the altar. The big Christianese word is sanctification. Sanctification is the hope of humanity. It's the golden ice-cream for the meal of grace. — Aaron Mark Reimer

Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure. — Anne Rice

I think, at the end of the day, the real antagonist is the brokenness of humanity. — LeCrae

In some mysterious way, in all his brokenness, he reveals to us our own brokenness, our difficulties in loving, our barriers and hardness of heart. If he is so broken and so hurt and yet is still such a source of life, then I, too, am allowed to look at my own brokenness and to trust that I, too, can give life to others. I do not have to pretend that I am better than others and that I have to win in all the competitions. It's okay to be myself, just as I am, in my uniqueness. That, of course, is a very healing and liberating experience. I am allowed to be myself, with all my psychological and physical wounds, with all my limitations but with all my gifts too. And I can trust that I am loved just as I am, and that I, too, can love and grow. — Rick Santorum

It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever. — Paula McLain

Activating our light and our full potential requires that we embrace our shadow. Realizing our wholeness requires us to become big enough to hold our brokenness. — Derek Rydall

We connect with others through brokenness and pain. That's the heart of Christianity. It's in our pain we are able to reach them - not through triumphant and victorious living. — Michael Joel Green

There is no brokenness of heart which Jesus cannot bind up. "His blood cleanseth from all sin." We have but to think of the myriads who have been delivered from all sorts of diseases through the power and virtue of his touch, and we shall joyfully put ourselves in his hands. We trust him, and sin dies; we love him, and grace lives; we wait for him and grace is strengthened; we see him as he is, and grace is perfected for ever. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Our lives,our brokenness,our flaws and failures are precisely what God designed to reflect a perfect love. — Peter Adejimi

We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. — Bryan Stevenson

This is why the "apply some principles" approach to marriage improvement doesn't work. So long as we choose to turn a blind eye to how we are fallen as men or women, and to the unique style of relating that we have forged out of our sin and brokenness, we will continue to do damage to our marriages. — John Eldredge

No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether. I was always tempted to resuscitate such men by my own joyousness or luminosity.
When I break glasses in a night club, as the Russians do, when my unconscious breaks out in wild rebellions, it is against life which has crippled these idealistic, romantic men. I respect these men, cold, pure, faithful, devoted, moral, delicate, sensitive, and unequal to life, more than I respect the tough-minded ones who return three blows to one received, who kill those who hurt them. — Anais Nin

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved. — Richard Rohr

Learning the way of grace is about truth. It's reconciling the truth, of both our own infinite value and of others' infinite value - despite our depths of
brokenness. — James Prescott

Brokenness to redemption, where mercy and grace kiss both sides of our face.
Brokenness where we are split open.
Redemption where God knits us back together.
Mercy when we don't get the punishment we do deserve.
Grace when we get the lavish love gifts we don't deserve.
So here we are. — Lysa TerKeurst

To trust in you, Jesus - to boast in the gift of your righteousness, to rest in the constancy of your love, to wake up each day to your endless mercies, to hear you sing to us in the gospel - is to feel the stranglehold of shame lose its grip over our hearts. Jesus, I praise you for taking the guilt of our sin and the shame of our brokenness on the cross. You became sin for us that in you we might become the righteousness of God. Because of you, judgment day holds no terror. The cross was our judgment day. We no longer fear the gaze of God because of the grace of God we have in you. — Scotty Smith

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Every day I have spent in Uganda has been beautifully overwhelming; everywhere I have looked, raw, filthy, human need and brokenness have been on display, begging for someone to meet them, fix them. And even though I realize I cannot always mend or meet, I can enter in. I can enter into someone's pain and sit with them and know. This is Jesus. Not that He apologizes for the hard and the hurt, but that he enters in, He comes with us to the hard places. And so I continue to enter. — Katie Davis

Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

The mix in our rooms is so touching: the clutter and the cracks in the wall belie a bleakness or brokenness in our lives; while photos and a few rare objects show our pride, our rare shining moments ... these rooms are future ruins — Anne Lamott

You work so hard to fix yourself, but maybe what you need isn't another tactic, another book, another expert, another five-step plan. Maybe, you don't need to be fixed. Maybe, what's really holding you back is the idea that you need to be fixed. Maybe you just need to let yourself play instead of always making yourself do homework. — Vironika Tugaleva

She is brave and strong and broken all at once. As she speaks it is as if her existence is no longer real to her in itself, more like a living epitaph to a life that was. — Anna Funder

Maybe she will be broken forever. but if it is so, she will adorn it with radiant elegance; and all that man will ever discern is her effortless grace and the softness of her smile. — Terry A. O'Neal

You and I will never meet God in revival until we first meet Him in brokenness. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

singing has to come from the inside, and i don't have anything left inside.'
'really? How did that happen?'
'it all just drained out. — Francine Rivers

every time she remembered something painful, she could lift it up with her hands in worship or prayer and God would take her brokenness like an offering. — Nancy Alcorn

Life is a broken thing. It's what we do with the pieces that defines us. — Corban Addison

I looked up and beyond him again, focusing in on the horror that swords, arrows, clubs, and staffs left behind on human flesh. The open wounds. The blood, The brokenness. The inglorious remains of war. — Lisa Tawn Bergren

Christ invites us to remain in touch with the many sufferings of every day and to taste the beginning of hope and new life right there, where we live amid our hurts and pains and brokenness. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

...I understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we're also in a web of healing and mercy. — Bryan Stevenson

There is complete hope for terminal illness in the power of the Almighty God. The hands of Jesus are healing hands...the hands of Jesus are saving hands. Jesus brought peace and restoration, reconciliation, power, purpose, love, understading, purity and compatibility with him and the world we live in. we are healed through him. He mends brokenness and gives us back our lives which are stollen by the trials and suffering of this dark world. He is the light and life giving God. We ought to pray in our daily lives to receive from God, his help, upholding power and healing in the Name of Jesus Christ his one and only Son. When we ask from him...then we receive healing, relief from suffering, we stop living in fear of death. Read these books and experience the real presence of the supernatural, almighty sovereign and loving God. — Stellah Mupanduki

When I see brokenness, poverty and crime in inner cities, I also see the enormous potential and readiness for transformation and rebirth. We are creating an art form that comes from the heart and reflects the pain and sorrow of people's lives. It also expresses joy, beauty, and love. This process lays the foundation of building a genuine community in which people are reconnected with their families, sustained by meaningful work, nurtured by the care of each other and will together raise and educate their children. Then we witness social change in action. — Lily Yeh

Embracing our brokenness creates a need and a desire for mercy and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. — Bryan Stevenson

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life. — G.K. Chesterton

Our greatest hope does not rest in the death of suffering. Neither does our help lie in us having a full and perfect life, with no pain, no brokenness, and no Lyme disease. Instead our hope lies in God and we hope in the fact that this is our temporary home and our forever home with Him in Heaven is perfect. This hope- this beautiful and living hope (I Peter 1:3-4) is for the future but also gives us hope for our present days. — Rebecca VanDeMark

I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instruments, their broken lives, and begin again. — Steve Goodier

If you spend time judging and criticizing people, you will not have time to heal from your pain or brokenness. You cannot love yourself when you judge or criticize others who are created in God's image and after His Likeness...in which you are also created. Love cannot operate from a space of pain. Love and hurt cannot reside in the same space. — Kemi Sogunle

When you really love someone, you see all their mess and their brokenness and you love them anyway. In fact, seeing all of that sort of makes you love them more. — Heather Hepler

There is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. — Bryan Stevenson

You underestimate the healing power of love. Love mends many things; it could mend the brokenness inside of you." "Bloody hell, did you get — Quinn Loftis

Paradoxically, we achieve true wholeness only by embracing our fragility and sometimes, our brokenness. — Jalaja Bonheim

When bridges seem to give way, we fall into Christ's safe arms, true bridge, and not into hopelessness. It is safe to trust! We can be too weak to go on because His strength is made perfect in utter brokenness and nail-pierced hands help up. It is safe to trust! We can give thanks in everything because there's a good God leading, working all things into good. It is safe to trust! The million bridges behind us may seem flattened to the earthly eye, but all bridges ultimately hold, fastened by nails. It is safe to trust. — Ann Voskamp

Suffering reminds us of our brokenness, our humanity. It disarms us of our self-absorption and magnifies our need for one another. — Marquita Burke-DeJesus

Real care means the willingness to help each other in making our brokenness into the gateway to joy. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Boundaries come after grace, because compassion minds the fragile places but boundaries keep them from compromising the rest. Brokenness may have legitimate origins, but left unchecked, a wound becomes infected and poisons the whole body (and subsequently, everyone around). Wounds must be attended to heal. With an unhealthy limb, the rest of the body overcompensates through manipulation, aggression, or blaming. Boundaries here are kind. Better to apply direct pressure to the wound than pretend it is well; this may get worse before better, but it is way of healing. — Jen Hatmaker

Brokenness is the STRIPPING OF SELF-RELIANCE AND INDEPENDENCE FROM GOD ... but he is cast in total dependence upon the grace of God working in and through him. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Brokenness is God's requirement for maximum usefulness. — Charles Stanley

Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good. I sometimes unintentionally reduce poor people to objects that I use to fulfill my own need to accomplish something. I am not okay, and you are not okay. But Jesus can fix us both. — Steve Corbett

A desperate plea to the Trinity
is not something you can just
apologize for in the morning
-Drunk Dialing the Divine — Amber Koneval

Our suffering is often the deep soul groaning for the purposes of God in and through us. Mission cannot be fulfilled without love, and we cannot love without groaning and suffering over the brokenness in others' lives. As a result, we cannot accomplish our mission without suffering. — Gregory Beale

Lord Jesus, brokenness surrounds me. My body, mind, and soul are weary. I am weak, but You are strong. I desire the endurance to persevere and complete the tasks You have set before me. But right now I can barely get out of bed. The pain is crippling me. Please help me push through to the finish line for You, Lord. — D. Duane Engler

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. — Robert Farrar Capon

Generosity does give birth to intimacy - but there's a far deeper intimacy when we're generous in sharing our brokenness. — Ann Voskamp

We resist our brokenness because we want to BE STRONG, but little do we know that strength is obtained only through our brokenness, because where we are weak and broken we find God's strength to get us through. — Heather Bixler

Revelation is for human salvation, the mending of human brokenness (Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word 3). — Thomas C. Oden

Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility ... — Eldonna Edwards

This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say "No" to love. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

May the Lord heal the broken hearted. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Teaching by example, radical obedience, justice, mercy, activism, and sacrifice wholly inspires me. I'm at that place where "well done" trumps "well said." When I see kingdom work in the middle of brokenness, when mission transitions from the academic soil of the mind into the sacrificial work of someone's hands, I am utterly affected. Obedience inspires me. Servant leaders inspire me. Humility inspires me. Talking heads dissecting apologetics stopped inspiring me a few years ago. — Jen Hatmaker

Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now-not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'll want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back on those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go. Maybe. Maybe not. You have to take the risk, don't you — Paula Hawkins

Wish I could be a fragile piece of glass to accept my brokenness. — Munia Khan

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
this brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here its like I'm someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself
if I could just come in I swear I'll leave.
Won't take nothing but a memory
from the house that built me. — Miranda Lambert

He's inviting me to heal, but also to see my most meaningful calling: to be His healing to the hurting. My own brokenness, driving me into Christ's, is exactly where I can touch the brokenhearted. Our — Ann Voskamp

When we cry out to God as a result of our pain and spiritual brokenness He hears us and is compelled to move on our behalf because of His love for us. However, when we complain it is an indictment against His authority as a God who knows His plans for us, and it is an outright contradiction to the faith that we say we have in Him. — Minister Donald Graham Jr.

We are all wounded. But wounds are necessary for his healing light to enter into our beings. Without wounds and failure and frustrations and defeats, there will be no opening for his brilliance to tickle in and invade our lives. Failures in life are courses with very high tuition fees, so I don't cut classes and miss my lessons: on humility, on patience, on hope, on asking others for help, on listening to God, on trying again and again and again. — Bo Sanchez

We will never meet God in revival until we have first met Him in brokenness. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

And he came to understand that the burial of the broken wasn't eccentric - this was what people did every day, stuffing their brokenness down, pushing it down, smoothing the surface over, making the surface look like nothing was broken underneath. Because, if people see that you are broken, they will not want to stand with you. They will migrate away from you the way groups of people walking down the street will move aside when a shambling ranting man approaches. They will look at the ground and look away so that such a person becomes invisible. So if you are such a person or just an everyday person with some broken places, some places really broken, you will pull them back from view so you can mingle with others without being seen as broken. Because if you have the look of a broken thing, if you are pushed aside and turned from, you will never find your footing again in the world. — Lindsay Hill

Some broken vases can still hold beautiful flowers — Munia Khan

Beyond politics, the West is suffering from what can be called a crisis of brokenness - broken institutions, broken families and broken souls. — Gary Bauer

The real model for health, however, is more complicated. The real model goes like this: eating low-quality foods leads to overeating and metabolic brokenness, which makes you overweight and sick. — Stefani Ruper

Untraumatized people have a natural instinct to make healthy decisions in the best interest of their true selves. They are only limited by their immaturity and the brokenness of their external world. — Daniel Mackler

The word "paracleta" means "the one who answers the cry." It is not possible to receive the Spirit unless we cry out, and unless that cry surges up from the consciousness of our own wound, our pain, and our brokenness. — Jean Vanier

Plus, once he did the requisite double-take and recognized me, he'd probably beat the crap out of any guy who looked at me in all my Snow White meets Frederick's of Hollywood glory. — Katja Millay

How easy it is to let the depth of the ditch or the severity of the brokenness stop a good work before we even stoop down to do it. — Christine Caine

Bitterness about your parents' brokenness will kill you. Be the grace-filled end of generational sin in your family. — John Piper

Most unmarried people have no idea what it takes to make a marriage work; they grossly underestimate the price people have to pay to build long-term, mutually satisfying relationships. And they fail to understand that the only people with the strength to pay that price are those who have plumbed the depths of their relationship with God, and have dealt with their own brokenness. — Bill Hybels

Become broken in your flesh so that your spirit may receive the true love that was always meant to be in your life. His love will heal the ugly, bitter, painful brokenness and replace it with the beauty of real love. — Mandy Fender