A few months ago, during a leadership meeting at my church, we were given a prompt and asked to write a quick devotional. I wrote mine, submitted it, and honestly hadn’t thought much about it since.
Then this morning, a friend sent me a screenshot of my face alongside part of a devotional.
I laughed because I had honestly forgotten what I had written. Seeing it again made me go back and read the whole thing.
And as I read my own words, I realized there was so much more behind them. So much more I wanted to say about brokenness and what God has taught me through my own.
We were asked to keep the devotional short, so I had put into a few paragraphs something that has taken years of living, breaking, healing, and walking with God for me to understand.
So I wanted to share the original devotional here, exactly as I wrote it, and then come back to it and share a little more of what was behind those words.
The Original Devotional: Stop Hiding What’s Broken
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 12:9–10 NIV
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
For years, I saw my broken places as something I needed to hide. I thought strength meant having everything together, holding everything in, and making sure no one saw the cracks. So, I built walls around my heart. Those walls protected me from pain, but they also kept me from experiencing the freedom and healing God wanted to bring.
Over time, life began to expose the places I had tried to protect. The responsibilities became heavier. The losses became deeper. The battles became more personal. I found myself facing wounds I could no longer ignore and weaknesses I could no longer hide. But somewhere along the way, God began to show me something different about brokenness. A wall with cracks may appear weaker, but those cracks are often where the light shines through.
The cracks are not always evidence of failure; sometimes they are evidence of where God is working.
The places where we feel most fragile can become the very places where His strength is revealed. Paul understood this. He asked God to remove the struggle he carried, but God did not answer by taking it away. Instead, He reminded Paul that His grace was enough. God was not waiting for Paul to become strong before using him. God’s power was displayed through Paul’s weakness. We often pray for God to remove the things that hurt, challenge us, and make us feel inadequate.
But sometimes God uses those very places to transform us. The battle we are fighting may become the battlefield where He is shaping us.
Our cracks do not disqualify us. They create space for God’s light to shine. Today, consider the places in your life where you feel weak, broken, or unfinished. Instead of asking only, “God, how do I fix this?” ask, “God, how can You reveal Yourself through this?”
Reflection: What broken place in your life might God be using to reveal His strength?
Prayer: Father, help me stop hiding the places where I feel weak. Teach me to trust that Your power is made perfect in my weakness. Use every crack, every struggle, and every battle to reveal Your presence and bring glory to You. Amen.
There Was More Behind Those Words
Imagine a solid, clean, perfect wall.
No blemishes. No cracks.
It looks strong. It looks exactly the way a wall is supposed to look.
And nothing gets through that wall. Not even light.
Now imagine a crack forming.
Suddenly, light has a way through.
Another crack creates another opening.
And the more cracks that form, the more light shines through.
Until eventually, the wall that appears the most broken has become the wall with the most places for the light to shine through.
That picture describes so much of what God has taught me through my own story.
For years, I saw the broken places in my life as something I needed to hide.
I thought strength meant having everything together. Holding everything in. Keeping the walls standing. Making sure no one saw the cracks.
So I became really good at building walls.
Walls around pain.
Walls around grief.
Walls around the things I didn’t understand.
Walls around the parts of my story I thought made me look weak.
And for a while, I thought those walls were protecting me.
But life has a way of cracking the walls we work so hard to keep standing.
Loss.
Disappointment.
Trauma.
Heartbreak.
Prayers that weren’t answered the way I wanted them to be.
Battles that lasted far longer than I thought they would.
Seasons when I begged God to change my circumstances and He didn’t.
There have been times when it felt like I was watching everything I had worked so hard to hold together begin to fracture.
And for a long time, I hated the cracks.
I wanted God to repair them.
I wanted Him to put everything back together and make the wall look like it had never been broken.
But I’ve come to realize something.
There is light coming through the cracks.
And the more cracks there are, the more places there are for the light to shine through.
That has changed the way I look at brokenness.
Today, when I look back over my story, one of the things I feel is gratitude.
Not gratitude for what broke me.
I wouldn’t choose to go through those things.
I wouldn’t ask someone else to endure them.
There are things I have lived through that I will never call good simply because God eventually brought something good through them.
But I am grateful for what God has done through every piece of my story.
Every valley.
Every hardship.
Every loss.
Every battle.
Every place where something in me broke.
Because I’ve seen what He has done through them.
And because I’ve seen how God has worked through each and every piece of my story, I can honestly say something that might sound strange:
I wouldn’t go back and change that they happened.
That isn’t the same thing as saying I would choose them again.
I wouldn’t.
It means that when I look backward, I can see too much evidence of God’s faithfulness to wish away the story He has redeemed.
I’ve seen pain become compassion.
I’ve seen suffering give me eyes for someone else’s suffering.
I’ve seen things I once carried with shame become the very things that allow me to sit across from someone else and say, “Me too.”
I’ve watched God use pieces of my story I would have gladly erased.
I’ve watched valleys become places where I learned things about God that I don’t know if I could have learned from the mountaintop.
I’ve seen my weakness force me into dependence when I would have preferred self-sufficiency.
And I’ve seen light come through places I spent years trying to hide.
That doesn’t make what happened good.
It means God has been good through it.
There is a difference.
Romans 8:28 has been a significant verse throughout my life:
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
It doesn’t say all things are good.
It says God works in ALL things.
The things I chose.
The things I didn’t.
The prayers He answered the way I hoped.
The prayers He didn’t.
The things He delivered me from.
And the things He walked me through.
I can look back now at places where I thought everything was falling apart and recognize that God was still working, even when I couldn’t see what He was doing.
Paul understood something about this too.
He asked God to remove the struggle he carried. Instead, God told him:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
For a long time, I think I understood weakness as something God helped us overcome so that eventually we could be strong again.
I don’t see it that way now.
God’s strength isn’t only revealed after our weakness is gone.
Often, His strength is revealed through it.
Maybe my weakness isn’t something God has to work around.
Maybe my brokenness isn’t something I have to completely repair before He can use me.
Maybe the cracks aren’t evidence of God’s absence at all.
Maybe they are some of the places where I have learned to recognize His presence most clearly.
Now, remember that wall.
What looked perfect left no opening for the light.
But the cracks changed that.
I think that’s why I don’t look at all of my cracks the same way anymore.
I don’t need to hide every one of them.
I don’t need to pretend they aren’t there.
And I don’t need God to make my story look as though they never happened.
I have gratitude for them now.
Again, not because what caused them was good.
But because God has been good through them.
I know Him differently because of the valleys.
I understand grace differently.
I understand dependence differently.
I understand suffering differently.
I see hurting people differently.
And I understand what it means to need Him differently.
Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t erase those parts of my story.
Because I would also be erasing places where I encountered Him.
Places where He changed me.
Places where He carried me.
Places where His strength held me when mine wasn’t enough.
Places that now allow me to recognize someone else’s pain.
Places where someone else might look at my story and see Him.
Maybe that’s the beauty I’ve found in brokenness.
Not that being broken is beautiful.
Not that what broke us was good.
But that the cracks don’t have to be hidden.
They can become openings.
And the more broken the wall, the more places there are for the Light to shine through.
My brokenness isn’t the Light.
Jesus is.
The cracks are simply some of the places where His Light has become most visible.
So instead of being ashamed of every crack or wishing I could erase every broken place in my story, I want to let Him use them.
If there is going to be a crack, let His Light shine through it.
If my story is going to show where I’ve been broken, let it also show who held me together.
That is my prayer for myself and for you too:
God, we may not understand why some things happened, and we may never call them good. But help us to trust You with every broken piece. Use the places that have been broken. Use the cracks we would rather hide. Let Your Light shine through our stories in a way that points people back to You. Let our lives ALWAYS point back to You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
The original “Stop Hiding What’s Broken” devotional was written for One Community Church’s Our Sacred Rhythm daily devotional and published September 21, 2026.
Real Life With Katie Marie 
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