There are moments when I can almost feel St. Ignatius smiling. This reflection wasn’t on the schedule. It isn’t one of my assigned Spiritual Exercises. There wasn’t a scripture for the day waiting on my kitchen island or a carefully crafted contemplation to enter. But one of the unexpected gifts of the Exercises is that somewhere along the way, the prayer stops being something you do for an hour each day and starts becoming the way you live. Ignatius wisely builds in days simply to savor the graces you’ve already received, to linger a little longer instead of rushing to the next lesson. As it turns out, God doesn’t always wait for the syllabus. Sometimes He hijacks your Tuesday. Or in this case, your Sunday evening at an outdoor concert.
On the same day after an incredibly moving worship service at church, one of those mornings where the Holy Spirit seemed to have His own agenda and everyone else was just trying to keep up, I was with five colleagues from Brebeuf at Everwise Amphitheatre to hear Sarah McLachlan on her Better Broken tour. Sarah was the soundtrack of my high school and college years… clears throat… which, for those keeping score at home, was the 1990s. Her music lived on my cassette mix tapes, my first CDs, the radio, and yes, probably a burned disc or two somewhere along the way. She has this voice that somehow manages to whisper and soar at the same time. At fifty-eight, she still sings with a clarity that makes you wonder if the angels have been giving her private vocal lessons.
As we walked into the amphitheater, I couldn’t stop staring at the name of the tour. Better Broken. Two words. One paradox. How can something be better… because it’s broken?
We spend an awful lot of our lives trying not to be broken. We hide our cracks with busy schedules, polished social media feeds, carefully rehearsed “I’m fine” responses, and enough emotional duct tape to hold the Titanic together. Somewhere along the way we convinced ourselves that maturity means appearing as though we’ve got it all figured out. We become experts at editing our lives until even we start believing the highlight reel. But those two words kept following me all evening. Better. Broken.
Sarah shared stories behind the songs, laughed with the audience, even unapologetically dropped the F-bomb in a new protest song that somehow felt more prophetic than profane. There was honesty in the air. No pretending. No polishing. Just truth set to music. Then came the encore. “Angel.”
If you’re anywhere near my age, you probably know exactly where your mind goes. For many people it’s impossible not to picture those ASPCA commercials with the sad-eyed puppies and Sarah’s haunting voice asking for your heart and your wallet at the same time. Poor Sarah. She wrote a profoundly personal song about grief and loss, and an entire generation accidentally associated it with abandoned beagles.
But that night, something different happened. I closed my eyes. I stopped listening to the song. I started listening through it. The lyrics settled somewhere deeper than my ears. Tears quietly found their way down my face before I even understood why. God was speaking, but I couldn’t quite make out the sentence yet. It felt like standing in the fog just before the sun burns through.
Then, a few mornings later, down in a cabin in Brown County I found myself thinking about that night and those two words: Better. Broken. Then it seems like out of nowhere God dropped John 20 in me. The resurrection. Jesus appears to the disciples. The doors are locked. Fear has barricaded itself inside the room. Thomas isn’t there. A week later Jesus comes again, this time for Thomas.
And then I noticed something I’ve somehow managed to overlook despite hearing this story my entire life. Jesus could have come back without the scars. If anyone had earned a glorified body without evidence of suffering, surely it was Him. Instead…He kept them. Not hidden beneath His robe. Not airbrushed away. Not explained away. He offered them. “Put your finger here.” “See my hands.” “Reach into my side.” The very wounds that had once shouted death had become the evidence of life. The resurrection didn’t erase Good Friday. It redeemed it.
Maybe that’s what Better Broken really means. Not that brokenness itself is good. Cancer isn’t good. Betrayal isn’t good. Church trauma isn’t good. Rejection isn’t good. Alzheimer’s isn’t good. Abuse isn’t good. Grief isn’t good. God never asks us to celebrate the things that wound us. But love…Love has this remarkable way of refusing to waste them. The scars remain, but they no longer tell the story of what defeated us. They tell the story of what God carried us through.
I think about my own life. There was a time I wanted every scar to disappear. The church wounds. The heartbreaks. The years of wondering whether I was enough. The shame I carried. The relationships that ended. The dreams that quietly died. The moments when life didn’t resemble anything I thought God had promised. If I could have erased those chapters, I probably would have. Today…I’m not so sure. Because somewhere inside those cracks, compassion grew. Empathy moved in. Grace became less of an abstract theological concept and more of a daily necessity. My scars taught me how to recognize someone else’s.
It’s funny. We admire antiques because they’re weathered. We treasure old cabins because the creaky floors tell stories. We call an old family recipe “seasoned.” We love trees with twisted trunks because they’ve survived storms. Somehow we celebrate every sign of endurance in creation except our own. Maybe we’ve been measuring beauty all wrong. Maybe perfection was never the goal. Maybe love was.
Henri Nouwen once wrote that our wounds can become a source of healing for others. I think Jesus would agree. After all, the first thing the resurrected Christ does isn’t hide His wounds. He shares them. Not to glorify suffering. But to proclaim hope. Because a scar says something a wound cannot. A wound says, “I’m still bleeding.” A scar whispers, “God wasn’t finished.”
As I sit here on the front porch of Daffodil Hill Cabin, surrounded by birdsong, towering trees, and the kind of stillness that somehow makes God’s voice easier to hear, I keep returning to those two words. Better Broken. Not because brokenness makes us holy. But because God’s love refuses to let brokenness have the final word.
Thomas didn’t believe because Jesus returned flawless. He believed because Love still bore the scars. Maybe that’s why Christ kept them. And maybe that’s why we don’t have to spend our lives hiding ours. Because in the Kingdom of God, scars are not evidence that you failed. They’re evidence that resurrection has already begun.
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