Broken up is hard to be....

Icy driveway--see tire tracks at left

Snow on top of sleet, on top of more snow and sleet, left us with an ice skating rink for a driveway a few weeks ago. The immediate solution was the tedious one: slamming a shovel into the ice to break it up. As I was taking my aggressions out on the slab of ice, of all things, some old pop song lyrics came to mind: “Breaking up is hard to do.” They came from Neil Sedaka’s 1962 #1 hit (for one week) titled, “Don’t Take Your Love Away From Me.” I was a high school freshman that year, more interested in classical music than the current pop tune, but somehow  random exposures to that era’s pop culture found a niche in my brain. Technology that was a pipe dream fifty years ago allowed me to “google” it and hear the whole song (with a grainy black-and-white video) on Youtube.  Oh my, how times have changed. The singer was nicely groomed in pants and a sweater. Behind him, modestly “grooving” to the music, were young men in suits and girls wearing dresses or skirts and blouses! 

THE RING WAS THE THING...
Those were the days, when it was big to “go steady,” which a girl announced to her world by wearing a guy’s class ring on a neck chain. Eventually, there was the inevitable “breaking up” and returning of the ring. Somehow, as an academia nut with no boyfriends, I missed all that adolescent trauma. But as I emerged into adulthood and found my spiritual moorings in truly embracing Jesus as my Savior, I discovered a deeper, more transforming “breaking up.”  It’s what God does in our lives to take us away from shallow and worthless things and into a deep and abiding love relationship with Him.

If you haven’t guessed, I am a reader, with three to five books going at a time. Recently I read Henri  J.M. Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, commended as “must read” by another book “in process” on my pile, one by George Verwer, founder of the world-wide mission outreach “Operation Mobilization.” Nouwen found himself in dialog with a discouraged secular Jew who questioned the value of any religion.  Out of that came Nouwen’s insight that brokenness can be a gateway to joy when we realize it carries the opportunity to purify and deepen God’s blessing on us. The apostle James said the same thing: to consider testings of our faith as “pure joy” because these are part of the maturing of our faith (James 1:2-4).  In other words, to rejoice in brokenness because it prepares the way for a deeper faith.

To return to that pop song of half a century ago, but with a spiritual angle, getting “broken up” is hard to go through. But it’s how God woos us from the “crush” or love of the world’s slippery values to bring us for our true love and Savior, Jesus.