Broken

I've been doing a lot of cleaning lately - "spring cleaning" if you will! I have successfully gutted and purged every ounce of crap from the basement (oh yes I have a basement in Florida), the master bedroom and closet, my craft (aka "crap") room, the guest room and my sons room! I have very little left to do upstairs and still have to tackle the downstairs ... sigh ... but while cleaning today, somehow I managed to knock over a vase and watch it hit the ground and break into a few pieces.  No big deal - more of a pain than anything - just clean it up and pitch it. But I started really looking at the pieces and realized that some were missing. When I tried to piece it together, there were gaps - like those shards just disintegrated due to the trauma.

This made me think - how much of who we are/were does just this? Completely disintegrates when we are dropped and broken? How many times can we be broken and glued back together without there being some form of inconsistency in our appearance?

Does being continuously broken make us more fragile that the average bear? Once you have glued your broken vase back together, I would think you would make sure to take extra special care of it as it is in greater danger of shattering again ... Are we like that? Once broken, should we be handled with kid gloves and placed on the top shelf out of harms way? What happens when we once again hit the floor and shatter? Are our insides just as fragile as our outsides? For me, my heart seems to be broken easily - something as simple as not hearing from a friend in a month or two can cause me to go into a tailspin. Why? Am I too broken???

There are so many ways for us to be "broken". I wonder if people like me - people who have been to hell and back on a few occassions - are too broken to resemble what we were made to be in the first place. You can only glue a vase back together so many times before it stops serving its purpose (to hold water). What if someone can only go through so many traumatic journeys before they can no longer fulfill their purpose? Do they just find a new purpose? Maybe ... even a broken vase can serve a new purpose - a beautiful mosaic.