Breaking-In The Soul

Redefining Suffering
When I was young (and flexible) baseball was my primary outlet.
It’s where I poured most of my time, energy, and pent up hormones.
The gifting of a new glove is one of those glorious moments for a young ball player. The smell of that virgin full grain leather. The authentic red “Rawlings” badge on the wrist strap. The pride you feel when your teammates ogle over it as if you just picked up Thor’s hammer.
But a new glove is unlike any other sporting good purchase because typically it’s not ready to use right out of the box.
Remember that aromatic virgin full grain leather I was talking about? Yeah, well it’s usually as stiff as a piece of drift wood — making it really hard to grip a ball.
The new glove needs to be broken in. Beaten to a pulp, until it’s flexible enough for the players hand to clasp with it.
So here’s the deal…just like a new mit, our soul gets broken-in as well. Whether we like it or not.
Most of us are adults, at least physically (I still feel like a kid on the inside). That means our soul has stiffened up and contorted into whatever shape life and time and parents and friends and weird uncles and wicked school teachers have willed upon it.
Our personality is hammered in rather deep.
This isn’t a bad thing if your personality is glow in the dark and impervious to the flying poisonous darts of self-doubt, narcissism, and all of those other subterranean emotions.
But for the rest of us, we’re going through it, aren’t we?
We try to walk over the thorns and thistles and jagged edges and broken glass of everyday living, but we can’t seem to get across without some amount of bloodshed.
Even when things seem to be improving and a speck of light finds a crevice to slip through, we’re suddenly knocked backwards from an unexpected blow to the dome.
You might not like the sound of it, in fact, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but all of the suffering we go through, the light kind and the heavy kind, is the breaking-in of the soul.
John Eldredge, one of my favorite writers, once said…
“I don’t trust a man who hasn’t suffered; I don’t let a man get close to me who hasn’t faced his wound. Think of the posers you know — are they the kind of man you would call at 2:00 A.M., when life is collapsing around you? Not me. I don’t want clichés; I want deep, soulful truth, and that only comes when a man has walked the road I’ve been talking about.”
Pain is embedded in the genetic code of life on earth. Our soul feels it when we make poor choices or when we’re discontent with our job or when we lose a loved one or any of the million or so combinations of experiences that make up the human being.
When we can redefine these seemingly unfair events as the benevolent force that it truly is, we’ll simultaneously expand our soul and collapse our ego.
There is a universe of wisdom nestled inside of our suffering. By learning from our wounds and surrendering to the breaking-in, we take our soul back to its original, pliable form and hand it over to our spirit for reshaping.

