To be broken by God is to be made useful. It’s to have your independence and need to control stripped away until all you have left to offer is a willing heart. It's the work of the Spirit through pain.

I didn’t understand this fully until I met Fidel.

Fidel was a little boy in a dusty village in Mexico. His body was failing - bedsores, a misshapen head, eyes that were dull. His mother, Eva, asked us to come and pray. I didn’t know what to say.

So we prayed. Rosa, a woman who knows the language of tears, led us. And something in that moment cracked open inside me. Fidel smiled weakly, and said, “Adios.”

Two weeks later, he died.

And I wept. That encounter was a kind of holy shattering. The beginning of God breaking my own heart - not out of cruelty, but out of love. Because God loves to see us free and doesn’t reshape what won’t yield. To re-set a broken bone, doctors will have to break that bone again. God wants to re-shape our hearts, but first He has to get them to a point where they can be molded.

In the Kingdom, usefulness begins where self-sufficiency ends.

Jesus said to take up our cross. To lose. To lay our lives down. And those aren’t abstract principles - they’re blueprints for brokenness. The broken person knows how to lose well. How to forgive without fanfare. How to love those who offer nothing in return.

The unbroken defend, strike back, retreat into self-preservation. But the broken? They return blessing for curse. They turn the other cheek. They walk the second mile. They recognize it’s not a one-time event. We are often broken in stages, area by area.

An Invitation

What are the areas of your life still roped off with yellow tape? What would it mean to invite God in - not as a guest, but as a surgeon? Maybe it's time to stop running from brokenness.

I know that sounds counterintuitive. Everything in our achievement-oriented culture tells us to avoid failure, to maintain our image, to never let them see us sweat. But the kingdom of God operates on different principles.

Jesus talked constantly about losing, taking up our cross, denying ourselves, and laying down our lives. The question isn't whether God will break you. The question is whether you'll cooperate with the process or fight it every step of the way.

What Breaking Looks Like

True brokenness means allowing God to strip away the false self - the ego-driven, reputation-protecting, people-pleasing version of yourself that you've been trying to pass off as spirituality.

It means learning to find your identity in being loved by God rather than in being useful to God. It means discovering that your worth isn't tied to your productivity, your platform, or your popularity.

I carry scars from my breaking season - emotional, relational, and spiritual marks that will never fully fade. But here's the strange thing: I've learned to love those scars. They remind me of who I was and who I'm becoming. They help me empathize with others who are walking through their own dark valleys. They remind me that I serve a God who specializes in using broken things to do beautiful work.

Your brokenness might be criticism that cuts deeper than you thought possible. It might be failure that exposes the pride you didn't know you carried. It might be rejection that forces you to examine whose approval you're really seeking.

Whatever form it takes, receive it as a gift. Not because the pain is pleasant - it's not. But because on the other side of breaking is a kind of freedom you've never experienced, a depth of ministry you've never imagined, and a closeness to Jesus you've never known.

The world has enough unbroken leaders trying to build their own kingdoms. We need leaders who have gone through brokenness and let it change them.

Will you be one of them?