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You know the story of how Moses went up the mountain and received the Ten Commandments from God on two stone tablets. And how when he came down from the mountain he saw that the Israelites with the help of Aaron had built
a golden calf. And how Moses got angry and threw down the stone tablets
and smashed them to pieces...And how later Moses went back up the mountain and got two new tablets from God.
A Jewish legend says that when they put the Ten Cs into the Ark of the covenant (a big box), they also had scooped up the broken pieces of the original tablets and put them into the ark also. As they traveled with the ark, both the broken pieces and the new, whole tablets were contained therein.
Which means that all of us carry with us not only our wholeness, but also our brokenness. We bring our past along with us on the journey of life. We acknowledge the inevitable brokenness of life. We combine the broken and the whole, to remind ourselves that life is always ambiguous--our shattered dreams live on as part of our re-creation of life. Nothing is lost. We can salvage the essential elements of our ideals and bring them with us into the future.
God does not leave us in our shattered condition. She gives us a new start--new tablets. God is full of grace.
Each of us contains both wholeness and brokenness. That's the way life is. But God allows us to move forward without perfection. Failure is not the end. It is only one place along the continuing journey.
