Breaking the Cycle: Why Hiding Our Broken Pieces Never Works
- Lee Young
- Nov 7
- 4 min read
Hello everyone,
I am thrilled to introduce a dear friend and exceptionally talented Christian author and speaker, Jessica Brodie, who joins us as our guest blogger today. Jessica has just released the second book in The Dahlia Series, a series that deeply explores the challenges of navigating trials and tribulations while wrestling with faith and the journey toward hope.
Her writing has a remarkable way of touching the heart, speaking to the places within us that intellect alone cannot reach. Through her stories, Jessica invites the Holy Spirit to revive what has grown weary or forgotten, encouraging readers to release their grip on fear and embrace the transformative hope that only God can provide.
I wholeheartedly recommend her work—you will be inspired, encouraged, and moved by her words.
By Jessica Brodie
People always tease my husband and tell him he “married up.” In truth, I know it’s the other way around.
Matt comes from a good family of solid, upstanding people—kind, Christian, and healthy, their marriages are intact and loving. Their worst sin is perhaps an over-fondness for sarcasm. Me? Let’s just say my family takes the fun out of dysfunctional.
So when Matt and I fell in love, I felt an overwhelming temptation to mask the real me, the flaws, the baggage I inherited from generations of discord.
Thankfully, Matt and I decided together that we’d have a policy of being open and honest with each other, even if that sometimes created strife or hurt feelings. So I let him get to know the real me, flaws and all. Baggage and all. He did the same.
It was a risk, of course—I risked losing him when he saw the mess I was deep down. But he didn’t run. We met soul to soul, and we allowed Jesus to buffer what was broken. We allowed Jesus to heal the messy and create the perfect beauty he intended in our relationship.
The best part? I knew that when Matt fell in love with me, it was real. There was no illusion.
As a writer, I have a passion for exploring real-life struggles in my fiction. I love tackling issues we all face, whether that’s mental illness, abuse, poverty, pride, or an over-consuming desire to hide the fractures that threaten to topple us.
And that’s what’s going on in my latest novel, Tangled Roots. Tiff Steadman has spent seven years running from the broken pieces of her past—the alcoholic parents, the convicted-felon brother, the shame of being “one of those no-good Steadmans.” Now, as editor of the Dahlia Weekly, she’s finally built the respectable life she’s always craved. With a proposal from her upstanding boyfriend, Bobby, everything seems perfect.
Until her past comes knocking. For just as Tiff begins to make wedding plans, she gets word that her brother has been released from prison … and his parole officer wants him to join Tiff in Dahlia. But Tiff hasn’t told anyone, including her fiancé, about her past—or about her brother.
Nor has she forgiven her brother for the wrongs he’s done, or for abandoning her to survive the chaos of their family alone. And she can’t believe her brother really has become a born-again Christian and wants to turn his life around, despite his letters and his pleas.
She’s also not convinced that she herself won’t repeat the cycle her family started.
I don’t know about you, but I can relate to Tiff. I can understand her desire to run from the past, to bury her history, to hide those broken pieces so far away they feel like they don’t even matter.
The trouble is that broken pieces sometimes have their own way of making it back to the surface. And that’s what happens in Tangled Roots.
That’s what happens for a lot of us.
Tiff has to learn that facing the past can be a positive. Facing the past—and being honest and authentic with those she loves, including and especially her fiancé—will help her heal once and for all.
You can’t put a bandage on a broken arm and expect it to mend without issue. Sometimes you need to set things right for fractures to heal.
I think Jesus taught in parables for a reason. He knew stories help clarify difficult truths. We humans like to complicate things, and sometimes it takes wrapping our minds around wisdom in a creative or unorthodox way for it to really sink in.
My hope is that Tiff’s story might help those out there who are having trouble facing up to their own pasts, or who fear letting those close to them see their unmasked pain or broken pieces.
We are meant to walk together in authenticity. Masks hinder our growth and our ability to genuinely connect with each other, whether as people in community with each other or in a marriage.
No one is perfect. Loving well means loving in spite of difficulty. In spite of brokenness.
Just as God loves us, so also must we strive to love.
I’m thankful Matt and I chose to keep the masks off and the honesty and openness central to our marriage. We are stronger today because of it.
It’s a daily process. But it’s one we don’t walk alone.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”— 2 Corinthians 4:7 (NIV)
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”— 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 (NIV)
Jessica Brodie is an award-winning author and journalist with thousands of articles to her name and a huge heart for people and their inspiring redemption stories. Her two Christian contemporary novels, The Memory Garden and Tangled Roots, are Amazon bestsellers. She holds a master’s in English and a bachelor’s in communications. A native of Miami, Florida, she now makes her home in South Carolina with her husband Matt, four children, three misfit cats, and one giant German Shepherd. Find her at JessicaBrodie.com.
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