Breakdowns: ‘Broken’ vs. ‘Being Broken In’

by Alan Howell

Director of Church Relations

I had a conversation recently with someone whose life and experience in Christian missions has not gone according to plan.

This person has been passionate about Kingdom ministry for a long time. And a few years ago, they took big, bold steps to move overseas and serve in cross-cultural missions... but things didn’t work out like anyone had hoped. There was a breakdown that left them feeling wounded and broken. Since then, as they’ve waded through layers of disappointment and fallout, they’ve been in a season of waiting. Trying to make things work in a new city, finding work, and making semblances of a new patched together life-plan somehow work. It’s been really hard on multiple levels: isolation, vocational questions, financial challenges, and more.

And now, just when things seem to have settled down, stabilizing into a new normal, a surprising door back into cross-cultural ministry in a different part of the world has started to open for them. This opportunity may be an even better fit for them than the previous one.

But, instead of clarity, there is confusion. They shared with me about feeling an odd mix of impatience and hesitance. While in many ways this new door into missions is what they have been praying for, and they are really ready for this current season of waiting to be over, now they are facing a different type of risk. Reaching out to answer the call to missions once again means being vulnerable, opening up to pain and potential disappointment. What if things go sideways? What if “it” happens again and things don’t work out?

While challenges, difficulties, and suffering are part of all human existence, they can play an especially strange role in Christian missions. We have to remember that at some level Kingdom workers are the ones who ask for additional layers of difficulty. They ask to be sent by churches to hard parts of the world to do something hard, and that can be... well... hard. So, everyone involved in missions — from the goers to the senders — needs to have ways of making sense of suffering as part of the story. It was part of Jesus’ story, for sure. In his life we see that there is no crown without the cross, and his sovereignty is linked to his suffering. And he asks us to take up our cross and follow him.

Whether they are expected or not, hard experiences can break us. But there is an important difference in what they ultimately do to us — the difference between “being broken” and “being broken in.” And at the right time, in the right conversation, between the right people, naming and noticing that distinction can really matter.

A baseball bat that is broken, for example, is now useless. But baseball gloves are different. Brand-new gloves are stiff, rigid, and difficult to use. Before they can function well on the field, they need to be broken in first. Through repeated use, stretching, bending, wear, and time (and sometimes by intentionally running over them repeatedly with a car!), gloves become flexible, responsive, and fit for their purpose. One type of breaking destroys usefulness (broken bat); the other type does a different type of damage that actually develops its effectiveness (baseball glove).

We need to remember that God’s plans are not to break people, but to leverage even the difficulties and challenges of life to break us in and make us fit to play well. While it is often hard to sense, the Holy Spirit is present with us through breakdown seasons full of disappointment, failure, pain, sacrifice, waiting, cultural adjustments, loneliness, opposition, and suffering. These experiences can wear us down, but in God's hands they can also be a key element in our formation. Through pain and difficulty, God softens hard edges, deepens dependence, teaches perseverance, and shapes servants who can be trusted with his work. God’s purposes are not destruction but preparation — not breaking, but breaking in. Like a glove molded to the hand of its owner, servants of God are gradually shaped and reshaped for fit, faithfulness, and fruitfulness.

Now, was my friend who is wrestling with pain and purpose ready to hear all that during our conversation? No. Instead, in that moment what this person needed most was presence and prayer. But having this framework in mind was useful for how I could imagine God continuing to show up for them and work to shape them even in the midst of suffering and pain.

And suffering is real. It is part of our story.

Sending churches and kingdom workers need to cultivate a holistic view of suffering, replacing hype with hope.We all must see life in the Kingdom not as the absence of hardship but as embracing a holy curiosity and conviction about the ways that God is at work in and through our brokenness. The hard truth is that the process of being "broken in" often feels like loss. And pointing out the potential gain on the horizon (like a silver lining) is rarely what people want or even need to hear in the moment. Instead, sitting with others in pain and being present with them as they work (and are worked) through just how much God is stretching and adjusting them to the new reality may be all that they/we can bear at the moment.

Thankfully God has a long track record of transforming the broken into beautiful.

One way to think about this is how J. R. R. Tolkien speaks of “eucatastrophe” — the sudden, joyous turn in a story when all seems lost and grace breaks in. The greatest eucatastrophe, certainly, was the coming of Christ: the decisive intervention of the divine into a broken world. Even in our stories, God does not merely watch from a distance while His servants endure hardship, but breaks into our stories with redemption, life, and hope. Those breaking point challenges that seem poised to break us become, in God’s hands, the means by which we are “broken in” for Kingdom work (this is where what feels like a catastrophe to us can be part of a larger eucatastrophe). And it is actually through that reshaping that we become better fit as partners and participants in preparing all things for the day when the final eucatastrophe arrives and Christ makes all things new.

For more on how MRN can help your church and your Kingdom workers use brokenness for being better “broken in” for cross-cultural service, please reach out to Alan Howell at alan.howell@mrnet.org.