This past weekend, I went up to White, Georgia to a car graveyard. Walking through hundreds of old, rusted cars from years ago in this graveyard, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how these cars were battered and rotting away. It was disgusting to see how they had been drug around, the pine straw thrown on top of them, the spider webs and other bugs taking up residence inside the windows and interior walls of the vehicles. But as I continued picking through the pile of rusted metal, I started to see the beauty around me. Yes, these cars were thrown out to rot, but the way nature had evolved around them was beautiful.

Each of those cars holds a story. Each car started off perfect and clean. Much like us.

I started thinking about how all those cars once were brand new, shiny, perfect vehicles. They were bought brand new by a business man, or a family, and were viewed as a useful object to get from point A to point B. Now, these cars were damaged and crushed, left to rust away. Yes, they are now used as a sort of museum for people to go through and see, but they have all been vandalized or have broken windows and doors.

When we are born, we are perfect and pure. We don’t know anything but the perfect world we are surrounded in. It’s not until later in life that we start to see how the world around us is not perfect. In fact, it’s so far from perfect, it can be scary. As we grow older, we start to experience the real world. We get tossed around, dented, broken much like the cars left out in the woods, rotting away. As we get pushed and shoved around, we start to build walls to protect ourselves. We create these walls as shields from the outside world and we push down all the bad things that have happened to us. If we don’t see the damage, the cuts, the bruises then it’s as if they don’t exist. If we hide our damaged interior from the outside world, we can move forward with a shield up in front of us to protect us.

We live in a broken, fallen world. Everyone has gone through hardships and we all face them in different ways. Some face them head on and grow from the experience. Others prefer to push our troubled past down into our unconscious and build up a wall to shield ourselves. There is no wrong or right way to handle difficult situations thrown at us. We can’t go through life without getting tossed around and feeling forgotten. Like the cars in the woods with trees growing up through the windows and bumpers, we can sometimes feel broken and kicked to the curb to be left there, forgotten and broken.

But there is also beauty in the broken.

Much like these cars, each of us has a story. We aren’t necessarily waiting to tell our life story to the first person that comes up to us, but we all have experiences that others may not have. We have all been hurt and broken, but we have all overcome these difficulties. We may struggle with different challenges every day from anxiety, depression, or grief. We may go through life with huge, thick walls up to protect us, but we are all beautiful and uniquely made. We all have a purpose in life. We all live in this broken world together and we all have to work together to mend it. We are all hurt and damaged, but we can all come together and find beauty among the brokenness.