Journeys With Jani

I broke a glass once.

Nothing dramatic. No wild hand gesture or kitchen tantrum. Just a simple slip, a clink, a crash, and there it was—shattered into a thousand tiny pieces across the floor.

And what did I do? Instinctively, I got down on my hands and knees and started cleaning it up. Every sliver. Every shard. I moved slow and deliberate, because I didn’t want to cut myself—or worse, leave a piece behind that someone else might step on.

Because that’s what you do when glass breaks, right?

You clean it up.

But here’s the thing—I’ve been thinking about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t. What if I had just… thrown a towel over it? Or shoved it into a corner, out of sight, out of mind?

I mean, I would still know it was there. I’d be the one walking around it, stepping carefully, rearranging things to keep others from finding it. Eventually, someone—me or someone I love—would trip over it. Or maybe it would slice open a bare foot at the worst possible moment.

And that, my friend, is what brokenness does when you ignore it.

I don’t just mean broken dishes. I mean the stuff deep down inside us. The grief. The shame. The guilt. The disappointments. The trauma. The lies we believed. The truths we buried. The moments that cracked us wide open.

We all carry our own version of broken glass.

And just like that shattered tumbler, we’ve got two choices:

We can clean it up.

Or we can cover it up.

One gives us peace, the other just gives us a ticking time bomb.

I’ll be honest—I’ve spent seasons in my life doing both. There were years when I tried to hide the mess. Slapped on a smile, threw a rug over the pain, acted like everything was fine. But brokenness doesn’t just sit quietly in a corner. It waits. It festers. And eventually, it makes itself known—in your body, your relationships, your decisions.

Cleaning it up takes time. It’s painful. It’s not always graceful, and sometimes you’ll find a piece months later that you swear you already swept away. But it’s worth it. Because when we choose healing—real, messy, soul-level healing—we protect not only ourselves, but the people who walk through life with us.

So if you’ve got some broken glass on the floor of your heart, maybe this is your gentle nudge to pick up the broom.

Not for perfection. Not for performance.

But for peace.

And if today isn’t the day you can clean it all up? That’s okay too. Just start with one tiny shard.

You’re worth that much.

XOXO, Jani