Broken Eggs And Broken Plates

Image by Klaus Nielson, Pexels. [Image description: A flour-covered right hand holds a cracked egg, dropping the contents into a "bowl" of flour, where another egg has already been deposited. Each overflowing with flour, a rolled-down paper sack and small metal flour scoop artistically frame the foreground.]

Krystal Parson, on a public facebook post which was shared in a private group, said this:

 'So tonight as I was cooking, I was thinking about life. And I said in my subconscious "I've reached my breaking point."

'I began to make cornbread and cracked these two eggs and I heard "Now I can use you!" You see an egg can't be used until it's broken.'

I disagree.

I'm not a product to be consumed by the discompassionate. I'm not a replaceable cog that can be cut to match the needs of a machine. An eggshell, once broken, is discarded, ground up for compost at best, it's contents scraped out and transformed into something unrecognizable and unidentifiable. I am not that.

If you want to play with the "broken" analogy, consider kintsurugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold - broken hearts are healed with kindness - to make a more beautiful and durable pottery that has the same identity and function as the original.

But the pottery does not have to be broken to be useful. The pottery that is broken by accident or design can be repaired, but it holds water and food perfectly well while being handled carefully. In the same way, people who have never experienced hardship are fully capable of learning compassion and humility through the kindness and communication of others. Perhaps some deity spares an extra thought for those who were damaged, promises a little extra love and care, but there's no need for abuse like neglect and violence to exist at all.

It seems like some people really struggle to empathize with people whose experiences they haven't shared. Those individuals have hard hearts, and even after experiencing terrible things will have only learned compassion to the extent that they have suffered. I, a soft-hearted human full of limitations, have not figured out a way to teach these supposed unteachables, but surely a deity who can "harden" and "soften" people's hearts could choose a way more compassionate than that. Surely an omnipotent deity that desires us to "love above all" would find a way for even those individuals to experience and be united in love instead of pain.

So, I disagree. I've been broken, I've tried to heal, and honestly, I'm more useless now than I've ever been. I may never be useful to that deity again. Broken, disabled, bitter. My soul has twisted and cracked and my heart is crooked and scarred, barely able to feel anything anymore. Is that because I never "broke", the way an eggshell normally does? Did I resist the hand of an almighty chef and cause Him to throw out the dish because there were too many tiny bits of eggshell?

I refuse to believe that I've been given up on by even God. I refuse to believe that I've been tormented by a discompassionate supernatural puppetmaster. That goes against everything I've been taught. Whether I believe in that deity or not, the God I was taught about is not one that cracks you open by force and throws part of you away, overwhelming your free will and violating your consent. 

It sucks that you're stressed out, that you're critically analyzing every part of your life and feeling like you're coming up short. There's no way God wanted that for you. None. I refuse to believe in such a heartless deity. I refuse to believe that there was no way for you to "become useful" other than the weight of being crushed by your experiences. You were, just like a clay dish, useful before being broken. You'll be useful again once you heal, but you didn't need to be broken to be God's hands in a cruel world. You're allowed to feel pain, sorrow, anger. You're allowed to recieve comfort from others. You're allowed to choose how you respond, and while I hope you continue to choose to have a positive outlook that frames this as something like a "learning experience", I really also hope you show compassion to the people who cannot make that choice, or whose spirits are shattered, and those who have no remaining will to live - people who have to be carried out of darkness because they cannot even remember what "light" looks like.