And I wonder if this broken-down-ness is supposed to be. Everything created enters a state of disrepair at times. Your car breaks down – you kind of expect that, but there’s brokenness in the natural world, too. Sometimes things do not work just right. Babies are born with deficits. There is disease in the human body, and turmoil among people and wildlife alike.

And we look out from this perfectionistic perspective, thinking we are going to reach a place where everything works perfectly. My car is going to run perfectly and I’m going to experience unbounded success without hardship or poverty. We get anxious about these times when we enter the broken-down-ness, but it appears these periods are supposed to be. Existence is this continual cycle or oscillation between broken-down-ness and put-together-ness. Maybe it started okay but then immediately entered this back and forth cycle. When you’re on one side of the oscillation, you can be sure you will return to the other. Restoration will always follow broken-down-ness, and vice-versa. It is not wrong to work toward being put together (in fact that is the point), understanding once you put yourself together in one way, you will enter the broken-down-ness again in another way.

There is something in the putting back together that is beauty. Think about it: every story is a story of redemption. The protagonist enters a period of broken-down-ness from which he or she recovers. That is what we love about life. Without the broken-down-ness, there really would be no joy. Joy is just the recovery from brokenness. I wonder if this is the whole of nature itself: that the broken-down-ness is supposed to be and the move to put-together-ness is the point. And the motion, glue and energy in between there is what makes the beauty: reconciliation. Call the broken-down-ness sin, call it imperfection – whatever you want to call it, maybe it is supposed to be.