Why Broken Cistern?

I have engaged in faith struggles for a number of years now.  The struggles began in earnest after my divorce, although looking back now I am aware that the seeds of turmoil and grappling were in place long before that.  The struggles cover the whole gamut of faith, from who is God and what is His nature,  to how does He relate to me, how then should I live (borrowing the phrase from Francis Schaeffer), etc.  I suspect these issues have been percolating in me for decades, from perhaps even my first introduction to the church.  Faith in God remains; from my earliest days I've known of His existence even as I have struggled with how to connect with Him.  Perhaps all this struggle is just what my faith journey is supposed to look like, the trail it is supposed to take climbing up hill over boulders and not walking smoothly along a paved path.  Maybe everyone else has this struggle and just accept it in a way that I don't.  I don't know. But I do know that the effort has ramped up in the past three or four years.

There is, for me, something clarifying and cathartic about putting my thoughts and observations, questions and challenges, down in writing. It helps to distill and crystallize my thoughts, which otherwise would either swirl in chaos , or else evaporate and dissipate into the mist and fog of life.  So if I am going to write, why not let it be on the web where whosoever reads can benefit from it? (credit to a broken romance for showing me possibilities of blogging :)

The title I adapted from Jeremiah 2.  The setting for Jeremiah is the Lord saying His people have turned away from Him and created idols, broken cisterns that can not hold water.  While I don't think that idolatry is my issue (although, if an idol is anything that keeps us from giving all to God, perhaps there IS an element of that in me), the image of a broken cistern unable to hold the Living water of God has caught my eye and my imagination.  I'm a broken cistern, unable to hold the Spirit of God, waiting/trying to be be repaired and restored.  Broken--- troubled spirit, troubled follower -- looking for the Great Potter to restore me to wholeness.

Onward then.