The Day I Broke the Chair💔

🕯️ Some photographs hold more than an image. This one holds a whole morning.

It's the chair. Not a symbol or an illustration made to tell my story, but the actual chair, its honey-coloured backrest lying on the granite bench and its splintered posts still standing where they snapped. Nine years have passed, and still my heart slows when I look at it.

What catches me most is the wood itself. Beneath all that polished varnish, right where it broke, the grain is pale and raw, the part no one was ever meant to see. I think that's what happened to me that October morning. The finish cracked, and what had been hidden for decades was finally exposed to the light.

✍️ The girls had left with the baby. On any other day it might have been an ordinary change of plans, the kind you shrug off and move on from. That morning it pressed on something much older, and out of me came a cry I barely recognised:

"I'm not even good enough to look after the baby anymore!"

I wasn't only responding to that morning. I was responding to years of hurt that had never been given room to breathe, and to the quiet, relentless belief that my worth depended on being needed.

🪨 Long ago there was a little girl who learnt that crying wasn't safe. She made herself a promise that she wouldn't cry again, and she kept it faithfully, holding everything together the way only a determined child can, like a cup clutched so tightly that no one could see the hairline cracks running through it.

Decades later, there she was on a kitchen floor, finally crying.

The chair broke that day. I see now that something else broke too: the silence that had kept so much pain locked away. I won't pretend the moment was beautiful. It was frightening and destructive, and it showed me how overwhelmed I had become. Yet that moment isn't the whole story of who I was, and it certainly wasn't the end.

🕊️ God didn't wait for me to compose myself. He didn't wait for me to tidy the kitchen, repair the chair or find a respectable way to explain what had happened. He met me on the floor, among the splinters and the tears, and His whisper was so gentle it almost undid me again:

Finally. Now we can begin.

For years I thought I had to hold everything together to be worthy of love. That morning everything fell apart, and God began teaching me that I was loved even in the breaking.

📖 *"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." — Psalm 147:3 (NKJV)*

The tears that had waited a lifetime fell like rain on parched ground, and Holy Spirit gathered every one. I think of the old craftsmen who mend broken vessels with gold, the art of kintsugi, and how they never try to hide where the break was. They trace it and honour it until the mending becomes the most precious part of the piece. That kitchen floor was where the Potter's hands first reached for the pieces of me, and those golden seams would one day become the Seven Keys to Healing 💔heARTs💖, the very pathway I now walk alongside others.

🌱 Now another October has come.

For weeks I've poured myself into the PSANZ Convention, giving everything I had. People have been kind enough to recognise my contribution, while others have gently reminded me that I need to rest. Sitting with that photograph, I wonder whether these two Octobers are showing me the same truth from opposite sides of the journey.

Nine years ago, I was worthy of love when I had nothing left to give. Today, I'm still worthy of love when I've given everything I can.

My worth was never measured by how much I could carry.

🌱 The chair still lives in our home today. My son, a carpenter, restored it so beautifully that no one who has visited has ever noticed it was broken. I smile every time I think of it, for my Saviour was a Carpenter too, and this is how He mends a heart: so faithfully that the break no longer has the final word. Kintsugi shows its golden seams, while my son's careful work hides them completely, and I've come to see that God's grace does both. He restores us so deeply that shame has nothing left to point at, and He lets the gold shine only when we choose to tell the story for His glory.

✍️ Perhaps that's one of the most precious things God has been teaching me all along. The One who met me on the floor is the same One who now invites me to lay down my load, not because I've earned rest, but because I'm His. Like a feather settling on still water, I'm learning to let myself be held.