‘A broken ankle taught me about the goodness and closeness of God’

Sometimes, God uses our “smaller” stories – the ones that cast shadows on parts of our lives – to reach us and teach us more than the ones that eclipse our entire heart.

My broken ankle is one of those smaller stories, speaking a much larger reality to my life. It was a Tuesday in April when spring felt inviting, rather than biting cold as it did the day before. Green was the backdrop of my morning run, my earbuds in such that I couldn’t hear the birds, but I could see the trees pregnant with life, ready to burst. I’d run the same route for years, every morning at 8am; I’m a creature of habit.

On this morning, the field alongside my running route that had lay fallow for the last year was saturated with the rain, running down the sidewalk, creating muddy pools for almost no one who took this route except for me on my morning run.

I slid on one of those muddy pools and fell sideways, instantly knowing something was wrong. Sure enough, an x-ray confirmed that I had fractured my ankle.

I slid on one of those muddy pools and fell sideways, instantly knowing something was wrong. Sure enough, an x-ray confirmed that I had fractured my ankle.

I watched the best of spring from my bedroom window – a cavalcade of Bradford Pears and Eastern Redbuds, trumpeted through my open windows by robins building their nests. I crawled the stairs to tuck little people into bed and missed daily walks through the woods. Friends and family chauffeured me because I couldn’t drive.

Eight weeks without mobility is a slight shadow in the larger scheme of life, but I didn’t know that day that a larger eclipse was coming in which I might know greater weakness and even tighter boundary lines.

Psalm 16:6 reads, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.”

It is a rich promise that can feel empty when we are staring at a fence line — a boundary, a limit, a “not yet,” or a “no never.”

But on those days when I heard my children playing down the hall and life happening independently of me — when I was limited to one spot because of my ankle — I started to feel God’s tenderness.

But on those days when I heard my children playing down the hall and life happening independently of me — when I was limited to one spot because of my ankle — I started to feel God’s tenderness.

Because life barrels; all of us know it and feel it, but we rarely can stop it. We say “yes” to more things than one person can undertake and squeeze the minutes out of our day like the last drops of water from a near-dry sponge. Many of us are more tired than we know, and in our tiredness, we forget … the source of life.

So, God sets boundaries. He limits.

And within the limits we most resent, there just might be an ability to see a side of God we cannot when life is slick and agile and works for us. Within the limits we most resent, we experience a neediness that invites God to be near.

When my actions can’t quite reach the high expectations I hold of myself, when my ankle is broken, or my tired body says ouch, or my child is sick, and life needs to slow down, when life doesn’t run on time or is disappointing, when I don’t get what I want and when my big dreams don’t happen, I have a chance to see a new side of God.

That spring when my ankle betrayed me was not an ominous foreshadowing of a harder time ahead (though that time did come, and my broken ankle prepared me a bit for it), but instead a pin in my story that marked a time when I wasn’t all that I wanted to be, and I couldn’t do all that I wanted to do, but God was close, and my heart came a little more alive.

Your limitations and mine are a gift… if we’ll let them be.