The Story You Told Yourself About Breaking

I want to tell you about a pot. Two pots, actually. And I want to tell you why the difference between them might be the most important thing you think about this week.

In Jeremiah 18, God tells the prophet to go watch a potter work. The potter is shaping clay, and the vessel goes wrong — collapses, misforms, something doesn't hold. And instead of throwing it out, the potter starts over. Same clay, new shape. Something new gets made out of something that failed. It's a beautiful image. Hopeful. The kind of thing that ends up on a coffee mug.

Then you turn the page to Jeremiah 19, and everything changes. God tells Jeremiah to go buy a finished pot — a hardened, fired, earthenware jug — gather the elders and the priests, walk out to the Valley of the Son of Hinnom (a place of child sacrifice, for the record — not a neutral backdrop), and preach the worst sermon of his career. And then shatter the jug. Not set it down gently. Shatter it. The Hebrew word is shavar. It means shattered. Irreparable. Fragments. This is not the breaking where you get to go back to the shape you were before.

We need both of these stories. I'd love to only need chapter 18. But chapter 19 is also scripture, which means it's also true, which means it's describing something real about the world and our lives in it. Some things get reshaped. And some things shatter.

The Condition of the Material

Here's the thing I can't stop thinking about: the difference between chapters 18 and 19 is not the severity of the crisis. Both involve bad things happening. Both involve the prophet delivering terrible news to a people who are about to lose everything. The difference is not what happens.

The difference is the condition of the material. Soft clay bends. It yields. It can be worked. Hardened vessels — fired, set, calcified — shatter when force arrives.

"The difference between a life that shatters beyond repair and a life that can be reworked is not the severity of what happens to you. It's the condition of your heart when it happens."

That reframe wrecked me when I first sat with it, because it shifts the question from what happened to me to what am I made of right now? And that's a much more uncomfortable question, but also a much more useful one.

Now before you hear that as blame — as some spiritual version of "you just didn't have the right mindset" — stay with me. Because the work of keeping a heart soft is not simple, and it is not a character flaw to have hardened. It's often a survival strategy. You hardened because you had to. You cocooned because the cost of staying open was too high. That's not weakness. That's a reasonable response to an unreasonable amount of pain.

But a heart that hardens to protect itself becomes the very thing that can't survive the next blow.

What I Built on the Wrong Foundation

I need to tell you a personal story here, because I think it illustrates what I mean better than any theological framework could. For the first seven years of my life, I lived with my biological mother, Toni, who had paranoid schizophrenia. She didn't treat a heart condition I was born with because she believed the doctors were lying to her. She drove us from Indiana toward Cairo, Egypt — by car, through Alaska — and that's where I was removed from her care. I was placed with my aunt and uncle in Indianapolis, had the heart surgery I desperately needed, went to Lutheran school, made friends, started to feel like I had a life.

And then, in the spring of 1997, I was moved out. Placed back into foster care. Eventually adopted by the Parrott family, who gave me my name, my parents, my siblings — everything I call home today. But for 27 years, I carried a story about why I left my aunt and uncle's house.

The story went like this: I was nine years old. My cousin Melissa found my journal and read it. I was furious, so I wrote in it — I'm so angry I could kill Melissa. She found it again. Showed her parents. And from that point on, I was no longer wanted. I was sent away. My angry nine-year-old journal entry had cost me a family. I built an entire architecture of unworthiness on that story. For someone whose name means priceless, I certainly get passed around like someone who's worthless. I wrote that as a teenager. And I believed it, in one form or another, for almost three decades.

In the summer of 2024, my wife Emily and I had dinner with my aunt, my uncle, and my cousin — at a restaurant called Cheeky Bastards, which made me laugh given the circumstances of my birth — and I finally asked the question I'd been carrying for 27 years.

At some point, you decided I could no longer live with you. Can you tell me more about that?

There was a beat of confused silence. And then my aunt said: Anthony, we didn't decide that. That's not what we wanted at all.

The real story was complicated. The state of Indiana had a legal preference for family reunification — a policy with genuinely good historical intentions, born out of decades of children being removed and never returned to their families. The machinery just defaulted to that protocol. My own nine-year-old longing to be reunited with my mother, even though she was still institutionalized and they couldn't even locate her, converged with the state's process. I was moved. My aunt and uncle didn't want that. They fought with Indiana to keep me. They would have adopted me if the state had allowed it. The journal entry — the moment I had treated as the seismic, family-ending catastrophe of my childhood — was a forgettable episode for them.

Two families. One shattering. Two completely different stories about what the fragments meant. For 27 years, I grieved being unwanted. For 27 years, they grieved being, in my aunt's words, unable to love you enough that you wanted to stay.

Building Life Among the Broken Pieces

Jump ahead ten chapters to Jeremiah 29. By this point, Babylon has come. The exile has happened. The temple is destroyed. The people are living in the wreckage of everything that made them who they were. And the false prophets — the Hananiahs of the world — keep saying don't worry, you'll be home soon, this is temporary, God's got you. Jeremiah's letter says the opposite.

Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens. Get married. Have children. Seek the welfare — the shalom — of the city where I have sent you into exile. For in its welfare, you will find your own. This is not a promise of restoration. It's not a guarantee that the shattered pot gets reassembled. It's instructions for how to build a life in the middle of the rubble.

And then — and this is important — it's in this letter, to these exiles who are not going home, that we find the verse plastered on every graduation card in America: "I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for your harm, to give you a future with hope." (Jeremiah 29:11)

That verse doesn't mean what we've turned it into. It's not a promise that everything will return to normal. It comes in a letter that says you are not going back to the old shape. The future with hope is a new shape entirely.

"Not everything happens for a reason. But we are meaning-making people — and we get to decide what we build from the pieces."

Kate Bowler, in her brilliant and devastating book Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I've Loved, names something I believe deeply: the "everything happens for a reason" framework, however comforting it feels, actually does damage. It implies a marionette God pulling strings to engineer your suffering for some greater purpose. That God makes no sense to me. God did not give my mother schizophrenia so I could have a great sermon illustration. God did not engineer a broken foster system so I'd have an interesting personal narrative.

But we are meaning-making creatures. We get to pick up the fragments and decide what we build with them. That is not the same thing as saying it was all part of the plan.

Treasure in Cracked Jars

Paul writes to the church in Corinth — itself a mess of factions, fractures, and competing loyalties — and says something that has rattled around in my chest all week: "We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not driven to despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Struck down, but not destroyed." (2 Corinthians 4:7-9)

The treasure of God lives in clay jars. Not marble. Not bronze. Not something indestructible. Clay. Fragile, ordinary, breakable clay. And the point — the entire point — is not that God makes the jar unbreakable. Read the list. Afflicted. Perplexed. Persecuted. Struck down. The jar takes hits. The jar cracks. But the treasure survives what the jar cannot, because the power belongs to God.

Which means my goal is not to become an unbreakable vessel. My goal is not to reach some place of spiritual invulnerability where life can't touch me anymore. My goal is to carry something real inside a container that will inevitably show the wear. And the surpassing power — the thing that actually matters — becomes visible precisely because the container is so obviously not the source of it. The cracks are not the failure. The cracks are where the light gets through.

Jesus launches his ministry not by going to the intact places, the temples and the seats of power, but by walking straight into the broken fragments — lepers, the hemorrhaging, the possessed, the dead girl, the tax collectors. He doesn't say the kingdom of God will be here once you get it together. He says the kingdom of God is among you. Now. Here. In the middle of the shattering.

The resurrected Jesus still has nail marks in his hands. The breaking was never erased. It was transfigured.

The Slow Work of Thawing

This series is called Stone to Flesh, taken from Jeremiah's promise that God will remove our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. I want to end there, because it's where all of these images converge. A heart of stone cannot be reworked on the wheel. Stone doesn't yield. Stone doesn't bend. When force meets stone, stone shatters. That's chapter 19. But a heart of flesh — tender, pliable, alive — that's the clay that can be reshaped. That's chapter 18.

Some of us need to work at keeping our hearts tender. The temptation when you are being targeted — or when you're in exhausting solidarity with people who are — is to calcify. To stop feeling because feeling costs too much. I understand that. But the heart that hardens to protect itself becomes exactly the kind of thing that cannot survive the next blow.

Some of us have already hardened. Years of disappointment, institutional failure, unanswered prayer, betrayal — you did what any reasonable person would do. You cocooned. The work for you is the thawing, and thawing is terrifying because it means allowing yourself to feel things you sealed off a long time ago. It is genuinely hard to rewrite a 27-year narrative that says I am unwanted. It is much harder to open up and ask what if I've been wanted the whole time?

And some of you are already in pieces. The vessel broke a long time ago, and you are not here looking for advice on how to stay pliable. You are way past that. What I want you to hear is this: God is not finished with the fragments. The treasure Paul talks about does not require an intact jar. The kingdom shows up in the broken pieces and creates something new.

You don't have to be whole to show up. Bring the pieces. That's enough.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

The story I told myself about the worst thing that happened to me turned out to be missing half the truth. I'm not saying yours is wrong. Some narratives built in the aftermath of real pain are accurate. But maybe — maybe — we could be open to the possibility that the story we're telling ourselves about the breaking is not the only story there is.

If you're in a small group, in therapy, in a conversation with someone you trust, consider sitting with these: What story have you built around a moment of shattering — and when did you last actually question whether that story is the whole truth?

Where in your life are you waiting to be "whole" before you fully show up — and what would it look like to bring the fragments instead? The vessel is not the shape it was before, and it won't be again. But we have this treasure in jars of clay. The jar is cracked. The treasure is still inside. Build. Plant. Seek the welfare of the life you've been carried into.

The surpassing power was never ours to begin with. That's the good news.