​

Our First Instinct: To Fix What is Broken

​

The instinct to repair what has been broken is understandable. When something fractures, we reach for tools: explanations, strategies, disciplines, therapies, resolutions. I’ve had some good results with these, and you probably have also. I’ve sat with people who meant every word when they said, This time will be different. They spoke more carefully, prayed more faithfully, kept closer watch over themselves. I’ve watched others take up new routines with real hope, trusting that enough insight and effort might soften the memory of what had already happened.

​

We tell ourselves that if the point of breakage can be named and the response adjusted, the original integrity might yet be restored. I know this instinct well, because it is my own.

​

But what is breakage exactly?

​

A break is not a temporary disruption in an otherwise intact system. A break is a corruption of wholeness, of innocence.  What is broken does not return to its original state. Even when something functions again, it does so differently. The fracture leaves memory in the material itself.

​

Bones heal. But the healed bone is not identical to the one that never broke. Broken trust can be rebuilt. But never without caution, vigilance, and asymmetry. Bodies survive trauma. But they carry it in altered posture, reflex, and fear. Every genuine break leaves a scar, a remnant of the damage.

​

This is why the promise of wholeness, of full repair is so seductive—and so cruel. It tells the broken person that wholeness is attainable if they work hard enough, repent sincerely enough, integrate carefully enough. 

 

The Quiet Demand for Lost Innocence

​

The pressure to be enough is present wherever a question is implied: Did you do enough? Were you faithful? Did you choose rightly? Are you what you ought to be?

​

This quiet burden of expectation speaks whenever a future version of yourself is held up as proof that the present one does not quite measure up. It appears in explicit commands—You shall and You shall not—but just as forcefully in subtler forms: expectations, ideals, best practices, and the ordinary norms of health, virtue, productivity, sincerity, or growth.

​

These hopes for improvement, when treated as tools for repair, slowly become merciless. When we try to repair ourselves under this weight of expectation, what we are really trying to recover is innocence—the sense of being unbroken, unquestioned, whole in ourselves. We want these standards to reassure us that the rupture has not redefined who we are.

​

But this way of measuring ourselves does not forget. It does not loosen its grip with time. It addresses us after knowledge has arrived—after failure has occurred, after fracture has been named—and it still asks for wholeness from a self that no longer exists.

​

That is why this way of measuring life cannot finally heal. It has no language for scars. It knows only intactness or failure, success or guilt. And so, it cannot restore what has been permanently altered—only remind us, again and again, of what has been lost.

 

 

Why the Search for Wholeness Cannot End Well

​

Most therapeutic strategies share an unspoken assumption: that the self is repairable in some final sense. They proceed as if there were an original person—healthy, integrated, coherent—who could be recovered through sufficient insight, re-narration, or behavioral correction. That assumption is comforting. It is also false.

​

Once a person becomes conscious of their capacity for betrayal, resentment, cowardice, and cruelty—and recognizes these not as foreign intrusions but as real possibilities within themselves—the idea of a whole, innocent self collapses. Awareness cannot be undone. You cannot unknow what you know. The psyche does not rewind.

​

This is why therapeutic techniques, however useful, are structurally limited. They can reduce suffering, improve function, and help manage chaos. What they cannot do is restore unity. They are tools for adaptation, not resurrection.

​

The rehabilitation project therefore spills far beyond the therapist’s office into everyday life. It appears in the need to explain oneself after failure, as though a coherent account could undo what has occurred. It shows up in the refinement of routines, productivity systems, and moral vocabularies meant to produce a self finally at peace. It lives in the desire to be understood—not for the sake of relationship, but as a way of being absolved by interpretation.

​

We try to mend ourselves through narrative, quietly rearranging the past so the fracture seems less decisive. We turn to improvement, treating the soul like a mechanism that might yet run smoothly if properly adjusted. We seek moral refuge, aligning with the right causes and language, discovering that it is possible to feel justified without being healed.

​

These strategies persist because they work just well enough to keep hope alive. They make life manageable and create the illusion of progress. But they never deliver what they promise: a return to wholeness. Why? Because the self they are trying to restore no longer exists.

​

Psychology can take us as far as naming the limits of repair, teaching us how to live truthfully within a permanently divided self. But it cannot cross the final boundary. The Christian proclamation begins precisely there—not with deeper integration or better management, but with an ending. And in that ending, something genuinely new is given—not drawn out of the old self, not assembled from insight or effort, but spoken into being by the word of grace that forgives. A person no longer sustained by innocence or wholeness, but by promise.

 

Where Repair Ends and God Speaks

​

The Christian message does not meet us as a proposal for final improvement. It does not arrive as a method by which the self might at last be brought into order. It comes first as an announcement—an ending. The ending of that anxious self which has lived under the assumption that it must first be repaired before it may dare to stand before God.

​

That first word is not a negotiation. It does not offer encouragement, nor does it recommend a longer course of effort, a deeper analysis, or a more faithful application of the will. It simply brings the human project to its honest conclusion. It speaks the truth about us with such clarity that nothing remains which we might quietly salvage or defend as our contribution.

​

Only when this word has been allowed to stand—only when the hope of self-repair has gently but decisively fallen silent—does the gospel begin to speak. 

​

And if this word feels almost too simple—or strangely unsettling—that is not resistance, but the quiet shock of being forgiven without having been repaired first.

​

God’s word for you is not an idea or a mood. It happens in ordinary, tangible ways: when a word of promise is preached into your hearing, when forgiveness is spoken to you personally, when the water of baptism is poured and your name is said, when the bread and wine of His supper is given for you to eat and drink. In these moments, without negotiation or precondition, you are addressed not as a self in need of completion, but as one already claimed by a Gracious God.

​

The wounds are not undone. They remain, as real wounds always do. But they are no longer asked to explain or justify you. They have been gathered into another life—the crucified and risen Christ, who has passed through judgment and returned, giving new life to you by grace.

​

And this is why grace does not set about fixing you. It does something far more unsettling—and far more merciful. It addresses you in the full knowledge of all the brokenness you carry. And in addressing you, it claims you and keeps you, just as you are; not by suspending judgment, but because judgment has been fulfilled in Christ for you.