What’s in Your Toy Hospital?

This is a picture of what I call our toy hospital. It’s a collection of things in our house that are broken–mainly toys, but also books, dishes, jewelry.

Whenever something breaks at our place, we add it to the collection.

And here and there, as we can, we pick up one of the items and try to glue it together or otherwise fix it. Oftentimes we’re successful, but sometimes we’re not, and we have to throw something away.

I have brokenness in my life, and I need a personal toy hospital–a place where I keep the pieces of my life that need further attention.

And here and there, as I can, I need to work on them. It takes some time, and often I need help from others, but if I’m diligent to work on the pieces, often I can fix them. I can make them right.

But sometimes I simply need to throw something away. It’s just broken–a grudge I’m holding, a shame I have been nursing, a remorse whose time has come. I have to look at it one last time. And I have to sigh. The sighing is very important, because I’m going to miss this thing. And then I have to throw it away.

The problem is that I sometimes pretend I don’t have a toy hospital. I fake it. I try to get you to think I have it all together.

And I don’t. I really, really don’t.

And so, that’s what I’m adding to my personal toy hospital today: my pride, my reluctance to be real with you.

There it is. I need to work on that.

How about you? What patients do you need to admit to your personal toy hospital?

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11 thoughts on “What’s in Your Toy Hospital?”

  1. That was a thought-provoking post, hit right between the eyes. Funny you would mention sighing. On particularly stressful days, hubby and I will notice each other heaving those sighs of relief, to be home, or finished with a task…

  2. I was very real right away in my writing. I didn’t plan it that way, it just sort of happened. My struggle: the grace I extend to others, I leave none for myself. I write and then I worry. I’m not good enough, I don’t measure up, people will be mad at my thoughts.

    I am not trusting Jesus who gave me the voice. Every morning I have to sigh, and let go of the worries that paralyze.

  3. I love it! This is one of the themes that comes up in my playroom with my play therapy clients again and again. It’s interesting to see how kids will sometimes want to trash something vs. put it in the toy hospital, or insist on fixing the same toy again and again, even if it’s just hanging on by a thread!

  4. Very nice post. Good point, delivered well.

    Me? So many broken things in my life. fortunately, the longer I live the more I realize that all the broken things don’t matter much when I have Christ. He fills in the holes, he smooths out the lumpy places, and he lacquers over everything with love.

    But, yes, I have to let the broken bits go. And I have to let go of the good things, too, because even the good things of this world are bent and battered when we stand them next to Jesus.

    So that’s the patient I’ll admit to the toy hospital today: Often my grubby paws are so full of broken and/or cheap plastic toys that there’s no room left for Jesus.

  5. Chad – thanks very much for the reality check and giving voice to something I, too, have felt inside me. I’ll be accepting construction bids for my new hospital campus…

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