Breakdown Before Breakthrough

Dear Reader,

Today’s post is written by a special guest, Sarah Hendrickson. There is so much I could say about her since I’ve known her since she was a baby. (She is my goddaughter.) She is a writer who is on her own journey of healing and restoration. Be blessed by what she shares. 👇🏻

It started with a phone call, as many hard weeks do. 

One of my family members was in the hospital. And it wasn’t a mainstream hospital where they sew you back together. No, this was the behavioral health inpatient unit— psychiatric care. This was a breaking not only of my family member’s physical body, but of their mind, soul, and spirit.

I’d love to spend these next few pages telling you, reader, how we reached this point. But I don’t think that’s my story to tell. What I can tell you is this: I couldn’t help but notice how the extremely visible pain in my family member’s story mirrored so much of my own monotonous pain – and, in turn, how much that reflects many of our own stories.

Although many of us will never see the inside of a psychiatric hospital, oftentimes, when tragedy strikes, it holds up a mirror to our own chronic and underlying messiness. This isn’t the kind of discomfort caused by a single event, but rather a compounding of pain over time. It’s the kind of pain I know so many of us can relate to.

It’s the pain of dreams unrealized.

The ache of “but it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

It’s the dull thrum of the messy middle—the effects of a world shattered by sin.

 

When I first met Jesus, I never imagined my life would look like this. I thought walking with Him would mean steady progress, healing, and clarity. Miracles and breakthroughs.

However, like so many of us, I’ve been the byproduct of many facets of brokenness: divorce, family mental illness, heartbreak, job loss, and financial hardship. Now, at the age of 31, my bank account looks fragile at its best, evidenced by my cupboard stocked with ramen. I don’t have an established career, a marriage, a house with beautiful children, or even a life full of autonomous independence and nomadic wonder.

My future feels very uncertain.

And it’s in moments like these, the ordinary days laced with a dull throb, that the bottom tends to fall out.

And here’s the truth: our spiritual pain isn’t singular. It’s layered. Messy. Complicated. 

If this is what walking with Jesus looks like, why would anyone sign up for it?

 

There.

I said the hard question.

The brutal question only some of us can breathlessly whisper in a silent thought.

We think that when we meet Jesus, we’ll experience divine breakthrough and healing instantly. And sometimes that does happen. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect that to happen (that’s faith, after all). But more often than not, what we experience is something slower. Something deeper.

Something we call a restoration.

A restoration of your mind, body, soul, and spirit. 

And the truth is, like anything good in this life, restoration is a process. One that we must undergo. This process looks different for everyone, but as I’ve reflected on my own story and the stories of others, I’ve identified some patterns of what this process typically entails.

Some signposts that seem to emerge when God begins His slow work.

I’ve come to believe restoration almost never starts how we think it will. It rarely begins with a breakthrough.

More often, it begins with a breakdown.

 

Where I live in Charleston, South Carolina, the streets are lined with stunning architecture—row houses with wraparound porches and palmettos dripping in golden light. But as you drive through the city, you’ll also see old structures standing amidst the grandeur with doors falling off, shattered windows, and tape hanging off unhinged doors. 

By city mandate, these houses can’t be torn down. They sit there, ugly and glaring, a giant red X slashed through the middle of their ghostly frame. I kind of love their wild and raw beauty. Eventually, some real estate investor might buy one and “restore” it. Or maybe it will sit there for decades, dilapidating in the blazing southern heat.

Having spent my whole life watching HGTV (although I’m not a designer myself), I know better than anyone that to restore a home, many of its parts have to be torn down first.

But it’s often a long, painstaking process, sometimes full of many delays. A contractor won’t start the project by throwing paint on the walls; instead, they will begin by looking at the foundation and identifying its weak points and areas that need renovation.  

Then, the contractor will begin to chip away at what was covering the house or will peel back layers of paint.

The same is true for us.

Restoration begins with the disintegration of the many different parts that live inside us. It’s the tearing down of the house, of the city, of the system of roads we have built inside ourselves, and then letting God rebuild that to his intended design. 

As it says in Isaiah:

“Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted, I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise, your foundations with lapis lazuli. I will make your battlements of rubies, your gates of sparkling jewels, and all your walls of precious stones.” (Isaiah 54:11–12)

God always rebuilds, but He starts by stripping away the broken, peeling, no-longer-functional parts of our lives. 

Restoration is a return to our true God-given identities.

 

After the teardown has begun, the various coats of paint and decorations we’ve put in our house can start to be removed. It’s important to note that this is not a tear-down to break us apart…

Rather, it’s removing the layers and pieces of ourselves that we’ve built around us to restore us to who God called us to be.

I’ve experienced this on a very personal level, having gone through three job layoffs over a three-year period.

I won’t sugarcoat it; it’s been brutal.

It has, at times, made me feel like I’ve been running on a treadmill with no end in sight. But it has forced me to relinquish the idea that any job, job title, or salary could ever define me. 

The first time I was laid off, I felt the discomfort of the event, but I had known it was coming. I accepted the road before me. The second time, I felt true anger. I had bills to pay, and the odds of this happening to me in succession felt unfair and cruel. I couldn’t believe it!

And the third time….I knew God was really saying something. He was asking something very important of me.

God was asking me to get very real with Him.

I felt angry, betrayed, and as though He was holding something back from me. I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such bad luck. I have pages upon pages of unrestrained and fully honest lamenting to God over those three years. It was in this breakdown that I realized that God was excavating my heart.

After all, there’s nothing to hide behind after the layers of your worldly identity have been stripped away.

Sometimes these worldly identities we hold onto are incredibly obvious, but more often than not, they quietly steer our lives in ways that we aren’t even consciously aware of.

We build these identities to protect our battered spirits. 

We hide in the shelter of relationships, jobs, material belongings, travel, and our personality traits. We seek to know who we are in so many places, spaces, and circumstantial realities.

But the truth is that there really is only one you, and no worldly identity or circumstance could ever define you. And oftentimes, we’ve never even thought to ask the One who created us a very important question:  

So, God, who do You say I am? 

 

This is the version of YOU that God designed in your mother’s womb. It is a return to your true, God-given identity.

Who would you be if you got rid of falsity, misplaced desires, idols, and worldly pursuits? Essentially, it’s a return of what’s been lost in this world.

Except… It’s not really lost.  It’s already there. Already within you! God’s just asking you to uncover it. And that starts by asking the question: Lord, who do You say I am?

I want to be clear – worldly desires aren’t inherently a bad thing. It’s when we look inward to ourselves to fulfill them, rather than upward towards Him, that we lose dependence on God, and the path inevitably leads somewhere we never set out to go.

Which leads me to the next part of restoring ourselves to the One who loves us. 

We have to bring Him the good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

This is where restoration truly begins; when we acknowledge the truth and allow the light to shine upon it. No matter how ugly it might be. Because in asking who we are, we don’t only bring the good parts, we bring the ugly. 

But light hitting those ugly parts can be… painful. To put it lightly.

The truth can burn with the fervor of a thousand hot, blazing fires because it requires us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and to examine what we see. And in that mirror, we don’t just get to see the good – we get to see what was broken.

So, how do we begin again, once we’ve looked into that mirror?

 

I’ve learned to start with two questions after first asking God who He says I am. I heard these questions from a man named Jamie Winship, whose work has shaped the way I listen to God. If you have time, I recommend looking him up and consuming everything you possibly can from him. 

These questions are simple, but they’ve changed everything for me:

“Lord, what do You want me to know right now?”

“What would you like for me to do about that?”

I used to spend most of my time asking God what to do first or why.

But restoration doesn’t begin with doing. It begins with seeking.

I’m still in the messy middle of being restored.

I’ve thought about that phone call a lot this week. And how it represented an opportunity to look into the mirror at the house God is currently building in my life.

Restoration begins with a return to being who He has said we are all along, beneath the dust, debris, and everyday brokenness of our lives. 

Restoration isn’t fast. It isn’t flashy. It has been an ongoing experience. A process that I have fully agreed to undergo. 

And if I’m honest, this isn’t the life I pictured when I first met Jesus. But it’s becoming the one I know He had in mind for me. 

He’s not just building something new in me.

He’s restoring me to His full glory. 

The same is true for you.

Next Steps for You

If this message stirred something in you, I would encourage you to start with a basic but very necessary question:

• God, who do You say I am?

Ask Him for pictures, words, scripture, or impressions to describe how He made you, and write them down.

• Ask Him what He loves about you.
• Ask Him what is keeping you from living within your God given design?

Each morning, try asking God these two questions before the noise of the day begins:

1. Lord, what do You want me to know today?
2. What would You like me to do about that?

And then sit back and just listen.

Let it become a rhythm.

Because restoration takes time and daily seeking of God.