My mum sent me a card last year with the following quote from a Leonard Cohen song:-
Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything,
That’s how the light gets in.
Later that day I went to a pre-arranged counseling session. I had no idea what we would talk about, just a vague desire to get to the bottom of my perfectionism and need to be in control. We ended up digging deep, which unraveled me a bit for a couple of days. At the end of the session, to my surprise, the counselor recited the same quote so I knew God was speaking to me about something through it. I went back to the quote to search for the meaning and it made me think of my mum in particular, and things we had been through while I was growing up. I had also been reading a Christian book on Emotional freedom, which explained things more clearly.
In most cases, I have found that God can only come into our lives when there is a ‘crack’ for Him to enter by. This is when people are most susceptible and most in need of Him. Everyone has cracks but use different methods to try and fill them in, which blocks God out. We all know about the common destructive methods people use like drinking, drugs, sex, gambling, self-harm etc, but there are many more and not all are obvious or even seem negative. In my case I have had some ‘bad’ and some ‘good’ ones. The obvious bad ones are mostly gone now, but the more subtle ‘good’ ones still remain and need further work/healing with God’s help. Everyone tries to fill their cracks as everyone is ‘damaged’ in some way whether they realize/acknowledge it or not. Some people only seem to have ‘good’ ways of coping/filling the cracks (like my mum), but they are still not good for them as they are blocking them from God!
These people have found their identities in being a devoted son/daughter, husband/wife, father/mother, grandfather/mother, employee/employer, Minister/Pastor etc for many years instead of as a child of God. Endless serving and helping others above yourself and God can be a form of idolatry. The greatest commandment is ‘love God’, and then ‘love your neighbor as yourself’. Do you love others or things/activities more than you love yourself or God? Keeping busy, perfectionism, hoarding, over-planning, workaholism, over-achieving/intellectualism, being completely self-sufficient/selfless are all ways of filling in the cracks to feel fulfillment in our lives, but only God can fill us perfectly and only He can love us perfectly/unconditionally. These can also lead us to subtle sins such as pride, comparison, martyrdom, striving, bitterness, passive/aggressive behavior and judgment of others, which we often don’t even realize we are doing.
So where do the cracks come from? They almost always begin in our childhood/upbringing, but even if you have had exceptional parenting (no one is perfect) it can be a gradual accumulation of many seemingly small negative experiences. In my case I now know what initially caused my cracks, but it was God who finally opened my eyes to them and helped me to start to confront and heal them His way. The deepest crack for most people is of feeling unloved – all small cracks lead to this. It doesn’t mean that we ARE unloved, but our feelings are reality for us as our immature brains tell us our feelings are the truth when they are not. The devil loves this and feeds us all kinds of lies when we are vulnerable, to keep the same feelings alive throughout the rest of our lives and generalizing them to all sorts of situations. The cracks (and coping methods) get passed from generation to generation unintentionally.
The key is to look into ourselves for greater insight into our cracks, our methods of coping with them and the lies that we have believed. Allow God access to them and ask Him to apply the truth to heal and fill them properly. Let the light in! The ‘English way’ is to sweep things under the carpet – ‘keep calm and carry on’. Likewise, the ‘Kiwi way’ is to toughen up – ‘No worries mate, she’ll be right’, but this is not God’s way and it is not healthy. Healing will likely be a painful process for a time and will take some work, but it will be worth it in the end to live in the emotional freedom and peace that God intended for us.
God used this whole experience to enable me to take another step in my own healing by prompting me to write a letter to someone I needed to forgive and to share my faith with them and minister to my mum. I also used the quote in a card to the family of a young boy we knew that died in a tragic accident around the same time and shared my faith with them also.