I use to be weighed down by my own brokenness, consumed by my failings and mistakes... but as I have learned to heal and let go and accept grace in the fall...I now find myself weighted down by the brokenness of the world.
When you find something like healing after years of darkness, you want to share that healing with others. And I've always been that person who wanted to make someone "all better." To see someone hurting and in pain breaks me. I hate when I can't do something, when I'm left to watch them suffer.
I hate to be helpless. 
Sometimes I look around me and I'm like, "Oh God. I can't. I can't go on living in this broken world." I feel the pain of those I love, the pain of those seeking answers and not finding them, the pain of those who have been hurt by darkness, who are as broken as I am. At times I swear I can literally feel your pain as if it were my own.
Sometime I wish I could curl into a ball and ignore the world.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have to see those I love hurting and feel powerless to stop it.
Sometimes I wish I could just stop caring.
Because caring hurts.
Loving hurts.
Loving the broken hurts.
Because people I love, judge me. They tell me I don't understand...and sometimes I don't. They tell me to to stay away so I won't be tainted and influenced by their brokenness...but they don't realize I've already been stained.
Loving the broken hurts...it hurts to even try and love myself. I reach and fail. I speak and mess-up. Reaching the broken means I often get misunderstood. I fail and fall and have to pick myself up and try again.
And sometimes loving the broken hurts, because they hurt you.
When I've tried to reach out, sometimes my hand has been slapped away. I remember asking a  young girl a question about her and her ex. She looked at me and said dryly, "you couldn't understand. You've never been in love."


I never set out to love the broken. I use to like to play it safe. But when you're broken and realize that the entire world is falling apart and a hot mess...even when they deny otherwise...and when you see that and know that there is hope, when you know that there is a Love greater than the darkness holding us capture...
you can't help but love on the broken.
you can't help but want them to find hope
because the broken is everywhere, around every corner, in every part of your life. No one escapes this world whole.
But even in knowing that, loving on the broken hurts.
It really does.
I don't know how many times I've been pushed away for numerous reasons, how many times I've been misunderstood or taken as the goody-two-shoes Christian who has no faults at the time when I'm trying to be authentic and failed terribly.
Loving on the broken means you'll make a lot of mistakes, means you have to know when you hold on and let go, when to say you're sorry and not be sorry for being real.
But no matter how hard I want to stop caring...I can't.
Because caring for the broken matters, because being beautifully broken is a process, a life style, something that no one should take lightly. Walking alongside the broken is hard because we are each fallible and we each make mistakes.
But walking beside the broken is not something to ignore.
Because you have to realize that people are also walking alongside you.
When you are walking alongside the broken, we can't forget that they aren't the only ones broken.
You are too.
So in the end we all walk alongside the broken.
We just have to choose whether or not to use it or ignore it, whether to embrace hope and the promise of second chances or pretend our brokenness doesn't matter.
Because it does.
And it can define us, if we let it.
Or it can become the starting place for changing the lives of others.
Recently loving on the broken has hurt me. I can't stand to watch those I love dying in every sense of the world and feeling powerless to stop it. I just don't know what to do. It's almost like watching a movie where you know the ending and want to comfort the characters and let them know there's hope, but silently watching them in the ups and downs and destroying themselves.
Loving on the broken hurts.
But there is Someone hurting alongside each of us, who bears the scars from our sins, who in the end is the only one who can save. We as humans can love on the broken but we can't save them.
I just have to find it in my heart to accept that.