Broken Tablets and Brothers: A Morning Meditation
“I will give you a learned tongue, that you may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he awakens me.”
— Isaiah 50:4
This morning I woke before dawn.
The house was quiet, the world still dark. Instead of trying to force sleep, I rose, made coffee, and began the slow rhythm of the morning.
There was no rush.
It felt as though God had simply awakened me to begin the day.
Broken Things Can Be Rewritten
In Deuteronomy 10, God tells Moses:
“Cut two tablets of stone like the first ones, and come up to me on the mountain… and make yourself an ark of wood.”
The first tablets had been shattered.
Yet God did not end the covenant there. Instead, Moses was told to carve new tablets and carry them forward in a wooden chest.
Broken things were not discarded.
They were rewritten and carried on the journey.
The Battlefield of Brothers
This thought brought me to my brothers.
My brother Glenn once lost nearly everything—his marriage, his home, his career. At one point he sat in a hospital room hollowed out by despair.
But he survived.
And when I think about Glenn and myself reaching out to our brother Andrew today, the image that comes to mind is not of strong men rescuing the weak.
It is more like wounded soldiers on a battlefield who refuse to leave one another behind.
Each of us has been wounded in different ways.
Yet we remain.
“Two are better than one… if one falls, the other will lift up his companion.”
— Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
Be Careful of Your Own Theatre
My daughter Cherish once told me something wise.
“Be careful of your own theatre.”
When we rehearse the future in our minds, we risk hurting ourselves when reality refuses to follow the script.
Jesus himself taught something similar when he said:
“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
— Matthew 6:34
So perhaps today does not require grand plans.
Perhaps it only requires showing up.
The Simplicity Beyond Complexity
After years of complexity, life sometimes becomes simple again.
Not the naive simplicity of youth, but the deeper simplicity that comes after struggle.
Cook a meal.
Clean a room.
Sit together at the table.
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.”
— Ecclesiastes 9:10
The Quiet Work of Love
This morning I found myself rebuilding my weekly pill organizer after making a mistake with one of the doses.
Small pills spread across a napkin.
Seven little boxes waiting to be filled.
It struck me that this too was a form of quiet order—taking scattered pieces and putting them back together again.
In many ways that is what love does.
It restores.
It rebuilds.
It carries forward what once seemed broken.
And sometimes it speaks in the simplest words:
“Let’s clean this place up.
Let’s make dinner.
Let’s sit down and eat together.”
Running Down Vimy 