His body broken for you

Not so long back I spent a week with fellow leaders on an Arrow Leadership course. Three residentials in, and with a commitment to open-heartedness and a safe environment, we’ve been sharing places in our hearts that few others see. One morning after we had collectively unburdened our leadership pain, passing the tissues from one to the other, one of the co-ordinators shared a prophetic dream she’d had the night before which led to her to proclaim over each one of us and over our pain: “His body broken for you.”

It was a deeply moving moment, and it’s a proclamation that I keep coming back to and centring my prayers around. The more I reflect on it, the more I understand how it answers a need within me that little else has been able to touch.

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Put some cream on top and call it pudding

I’ve been there a few times now: in the middle of a complex bake and it’s starting to all fall apart. Maybe you forgot halfway through that you were making a double-batch and now the proportions are all off; or you missed adding the eggs a few steps back; or (I’ve done this a few times) you kept the motor running on the food processor while you added the eggs in some false efficiency, and now you’ve blitzed a whole shell into the mixture. 

Whatever happened, you’re now at the point where even your best efforts to rescue the situation are going to produce an imperfect result, and the best move is quite possibly to throw it all out and start again. Depending on your resources available, it can feel like an impossible choice (high baking drama, I know!)

Recently I noticed a similar impulse rising within me as I considered my year thus far. Could I dump it all and start over fresh? Surely I’d do a better job the second time around.

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