Making Room for Broken Things

I saw a review on this book on a morning when the words felt heavier than usual. How to Carry What Can't Be Fixed by Megan Devine met me there — not with solutions, but with permission.

What struck me is that Devine refuses the script we're all expected to follow. She doesn't offer the kind comfort that rushes toward resolution. There's no "everything happens for a reason" wrapped in a bow. Instead, she says something far more tender: some things really are painful, and the goal isn't always to fix them. Sometimes the goal is simply to learn how to live alongside them.

That distinction has stayed with me all morning.

I think about the people who come to Healing 💔heARTs💖 — the ones sitting in Encounter Groups, the ones in prayer ministry, the ones seeking safe space, myself included. So many of us arrive carrying the weight of our own impossible expectations. We want to be healed completely, to move on quickly, to have it all make sense. We judge ourselves for not being further along. We compare our grief to someone else's timeline. We think there's a finish line they should have already crossed.

Grief doesn't follow a schedule.

What Devine writes about is what I see happening in those rooms. It's the person who stops trying to "get past" their loss and instead asks, "How can I be with this?🤔" That subtle shift — from fixing to holding, from solving to staying — it changes everything.

The church, I think, sometimes gets this wrong. We want to resurrect people out of their pain so quickly. We offer encouragement, platitudes, verses meant to comfort. We mean well. My heart has done this too. The instinct to make someone's pain disappear comes from love. Yet sometimes what a hurting person needs most isn't an answer. They need someone willing to sit beside them and say, "Yes, this is hard. I see you. I'm staying."

That's the gospel in the small moments.

Devine understands that strength doesn't always look like moving on. Sometimes strength looks like continuing to love, to laugh, to work, to connect, to notice beauty — all while carrying something tender inside you. All while making room for the unanswered questions and the memories that still ache.

I'm realising — again, deeper this time — that my role in ministry isn't to heal anyone. Jesus heals. I'm simply meant to facilitate the encounter. I create the space where someone can be honest about what they're carrying, where they can stop performing, where they can ask their hard questions and lament what can't be fixed. Then I point them to Christ and trust Him to do what only He can do.

I don't need to rush them toward resolution.

I don't need to make their pain disappear.

I just need to make room for it — and for them — and for God to meet them there.

This book reminded me that some of the most powerful ministry work happens in the space where we stop trying to fix things and start learning to hold them with more compassion.