Naruto: Rock Lee & the Burden of Brokenness

My best friend moved from here in North Carolina to Texas. He’s a huge Naruto fan. So I started watching Naruto and he started watching One Piece (one of my faves). I guess that's the closest thing to anime homie bonding we can do across the country. When I started watching, one of the characters I connected with most was Rock Lee. This kid had a vibe. He had tenacity. The Gaara and Rock Lee fight, when he drops weights and everything. I feel like that's one of the not only one of the best fights in Naruto, but I feel like that's a peak anime battle. Just throwing that out there.

In most anime cultures, worlds, and storylines, people take beatings that make zero sense and walk away like it's nothing. Eat a senzu bean, Merry Christmas. all it takes in these anime series is literally for somebody to take a nap, power up, eat a bean or whatever, and then everything that was broken is fixed. And one of the things that I appreciated most about Rock Lee and about Naruto in my first viewing of this was that even though everybody else around Rock Lee is literally bouncing off like getting stabbed, eaten, mauled and all the other things, he actually got hurt. He got injured. In the battle that he fought with Gara, he was left crippled.

Rock Lee was at a place where his whole life was just wanting to be a ninja. That was it. He didn't have powers like everybody else. He didn’t have ninjutsu like everybody else. He just wanted to train hard enough so that he could do what everybody else did naturally. He trained, did all the work, he did everything right. Before he even got to really the chance to experience what the life that he had fought for was, he ends up getting injured. He gets injured to the point that he can't be a ninja. He would have to drop every plan he ever had. His whole future is done. Hang it up, he’s over. Rock Lee was so damaged in his spine that if he tried to do anything ninja like again, he would die. Lady Tsunsade stated that if he were to try surgery to heal, the percentage is higher that he would die rather than live. Telling this kid, who by all accounts, did everything right. He cid all the work, had integrity, had character, had all these things going for him. He did nothing wrong and now it felt as if his life was over. He felt broken.

Have you ever felt some degree of brokenness? Like you didn't know what to do, where to go from that point on?

When Lady Tsunade was explaining Rock Lee’s condition, it showed an MRI image of Rock Lee’s spine.

If you notice in Rock Lee's spinal column, the white dots. White dots on a spinal column are permanent damage. That's not healable. That's like that's damage implemented and its damage done. Lady Tsunade was saying this is where your life is now. That’s a hard thing to hear. It’s something I have had to hear myself.

This is my spine. The picture on the far left is my neck. If you notice right about the middle, there's three spots on the left side where there's basically no white padding. The middle picture, the little oval in the middle picture, that's what a spinal column should look like from the top. The picture to the far right is what my spinal column looks like.

A little over a year ago I woke up one day and couldn't feel the right side of my body. I could move, I coud touch stuff, but like I couldn't feel temperature. I could get in a scalding hot shower and not know it was hot. I have if I literally cut my leg on something and didn't know I was bleeding. That same day it felt like my left arm was vacuum sealed like it was being crushed slowly. I didn't know what was going on. I was stubborn. I didn't say anything about it because I didn't know what was going on. I had also been on an antibiotic that one of the one in 1000 side effects was similar symptoms. That you would lose feeling on one side and your other side would be hyper tense. So I thought this is just the side effect of the antibiotic. They said feeling should return in four weeks. Four weeks went by. Four months went by and nothing. Finally it got bad enough I went to an ER just because my left arm felt so tense, I thought I was having a heart attack. If your left arm feels like it's in a trash compactor, you go to the hospital. It's generally good life advice. I went and that's when I found that my spine is being crushed by my three of my vertebrae.

I spent months knowing something was wrong within me. Not addressing it. Not sharing it. Not getting help. My stubbornness was risking my own life.

Like with Rock Lee and some of the rest of us, we get to a place where something feels broken within us. Sometimes we feel like we don't know what the answer is, so we just don’t do anything. I didn't know how to progress, so I just stayed quiet about it. When we feel broken and we don't address it, we're saying that this is just how we're going to live. That's not where you're meant to live. That's not what you're built for. That's not what you're made for.

You aren't meant to live in brokenness without seeking healing.

That goes for relationships, that goes for hurt, that goes for forgiveness, and that goes for your body too. Eventually I went to see a spinal surgeon, one of the best people that I could find. If you've met me, I generally try and keep a positive attitude. Like in general, I'm not usually grumpy. My spinal surgeon talked to me for 1/2 hour, looked at my stuff, said “thug it out.” His literal words. He said, “Thug it out. You're young, you're not in pain. Let's wait until you're older and deal with this.”

In my mind, 40% of my body not functioning properly was something beyond my capability to simply thug out. He told me we’d take another MRI just to be sure, but he thought I could hang on. For some of us, we pretend we have hope by not actually addressing problems. Rock Lee was in the place that if he didn't get help, he was giving up on his future. I don't know how many of you are stubborn but sometimes when something bad like this happens, I'm like “OK I guess I'll just die.” Like not even saying I want to die, but if I have to actually choose to proactively get help, sometimes that feels like such a completely foreign and impossible concept.

Rock Lee was in this place that felt hopeless. Rock Lee didn’t have an option to “Thug it out.” He was told that if you don't do something, your life will get worse.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted

and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” - Psalm 34:18

If you've felt broken, If you felt like your spirit is crushed, if you felt like your hope is diminished, if you felt like life is harder than it should be, if you felt those things; God is near to you. Even if you don't know He's near to you, God is near to you. God is paying attention. Sometimes we feel like we're just in brokenness by ourselves. I'm gonna tell you this, you've not gone through a broken day that He wasn't with you. It may not have felt like it. It may have felt like you were alone, but you've not gone through a broken day where he was not by your side.

I didn't say anything about my condition for months. The anxiety of laying down at night, not feeling and feeling certain things drove me crazy because I was going through it alone. I hadn’t told anyone what I was going through and that was foolish of me. And I know it's stupid. Sometimes we aren't alone even when we feel it.

Rock Lee was in this place where he was crushed and his spirit was broken. And Lady Tsunade said this when she was telling him about surgery the surgert,

“A choice has to be made.” He couldn’t just sit around being indecisive. He either had to take a risk and move forward or give up and allow his brokenness to crush him completely.

If you recognize that there's something broken in your life, you need to make a choice.

You need to take a step forward. You need to get help for whatever it is, whether that be therapy, whether that be the doctor, whether that be healing a broken relationship, whether that be asking for forgiveness, whether that be taking a step closer to God, whether that be letting something go in your life that you don't need in there. The choice has to be made.

Lady Tsunade said a choice has to be made, and at this point in the story, to do the surgery to heal Rock Lee could have cost him his life. There was like a 53% chance it would kill him, but still she said a choice has to be made. Quite often the choices your make won’t be easy or ideal, but we still need to make the choice which brings us closer to life.

I got my MRI and then I went back to my surgeon. He walked into the the surgery center and said “I'm sorry. I'm gonna say that 100%. I should have never told you what I did. I looked at you sitting here with a good attitude, smiling, and cracking jokes in your demeanor. I based my response on how you were acting. If I looked at your MRI on a wall without any context, I would have told that person to get surgery immediately.”

Sometimes we can get to the place where we mask our brokenness so well, that nobody around us knows were broken. We can even lie to ourselves and convince ourselves that we're not broken. Some of y'all got some hurt. Some of y'all got some emotional trauma, some of y'all got some brokenness inside you emotionally that you've just not dealt with and you're like, "tis but a scratch.” You convince yourself It's nothing serious, that you don't need to deal with it. Just because you can convince yourself of a lie, doesn’t make it the truth.

But eventually my doctor had said that we needed to do something. He gave me a couple options of like what surgery looks like and he gave me some more options in those areas. But then I arrived in the same place or Rock Lee where a choice had to be made. He asked me, “What do you wanna do moving forward? There is no physical therapy that is gonna help. There's nothing in those capacities. You need to make a choice.”

Rock Lee was literally put in a place of either take steps that are dangerous to get healed, or choose to live broken the rest of his life. Now those were my choices as well. His mentor, Guy Sensei, said “Putting it off won't make it any easier.”

This was the first time Rock Lee couldn’t improve his situation simply by trying harder. Every success he had accomplished thus far occured because he simply worked harder than everyone else. Now, he was at the mercy of surrender. One of the things that hurt me the most about Rock Lee’s story, he states; “Even if I believe in myself and try as hard as I can. It will not make the slightest difference.”

Y'all sometimes when we get to a place where we feel broken emotionally, mentally, physically, or spiritually, we think ‘maybe if I just do better, It'll fix things.’ Y'all we gotta quit self diagnosing. We gotta quit self prescribing how to heal things. We can’t place the weight solely on ourselves, that only makes the burden harder to carry.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” - Psalm 147:3

Just because you take your heart to God doesn't mean hurts aren’t happening. Notice the psalmist says God binds up wounds. Just because you bind up a wound doesn't mean it's automatically cured. Binding it stops it from festering, and it stops it from bleeding out. It stops it from getting worse. He binds up the wounds. He can help stop what's happening right now, but sometimes that still requires us to take steps positively moving forward to heal things.

God brings healing, but I don't want you to think that just because it doesn't magically heal overnight that He's not working. Sometimes healing takes a lot longer than planned and.

Rock Lee asked the question that many of us have asked at various times; “How come I am the only one being punished like this?”

Rock Lee was the most generous, most kind, wanna be ninja you could meet. He did all the right things, as a storyline goes, yet he suffered more than everybody. Please understand that just because you go through a hardship does not mean it's a consequence of your action, does not mean it's a punishment, does not mean it's a judgment, does not mean it's something to say you're suffering because you are horrible.

Y'all, sometimes we suffer stuff in life because life is hard. Sometimes we suffer because of other people's consequences. Sometimes we suffer because of things that we don't necessarily choose to endure, but they're part of our story.

Just because there's suffering doesn't mean that there's a lack of God's love or a lack of His presence in your life.

Jesus suffered. He suffered more than anyone. Jesus suffered in ways that we didn't have to and couldn’t imagine. One of the things that I go back to, and it's one of my favorite passages of Scripture. Is Jesus in the garden the night before his arrest.

“Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” - Matthew 26:38

Jesus felt that broken before the cross. If He could feel that broken, that means it's OK for me to feel whatever brokenness I'm experiencing and it not be a source of shame. Side note though, Jesus’ response to those feelings were to call on His friends to stay near Him, and to bring his pain and plea before God. While we may not be responsible for our suffering or brokenness, we are responsible for how we respond to it.

Look at the suffering David endured. David had an affair, killed his affair’s husband and lost his newborn child. David just went through the ringer. For the record, David was guilty. This wasn't an innocent situation. David didn’t try to earn his place with God again, he simply laid down his brokenness before God, much like Jesus did in the garden.

“For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” - Psalm 51:16-17

God wants us to give Him what only He can fix. He doesn’t need to see us try harder in our own strength.

Sometimes we get so used to the brokenness that we don’t know how to function without it. It just becomes part of our identity. As long as we cling to rejecting our brokenness, we reject growth. We reject moving forward. God wants our broken heart. He wants our broken situations. He wants our broken circumstances. He doesn't need you to be fixed before you take steps closer to Him. He just wants you to bring what you have.

I'm indecisive. I'll do stuff for other people, but making decisions for myself is terrible. I can make decisions for you to help you, but making decisions for me is the worst. Rock Lee isn’t much better. He finds himself in anguish, and he begs his mentor Guy-sensei; “Guy-sensei, please tell me what to do. What do i do?”

He's at the point where he has to make a choice to live with this brokenness or get healed. But getting healed for him potentially means dying. He's still at the 53% probability of death over 47% chance of life. In the background of this, Lady Tsunade is working her butt off to be able to get it to the positive percentage, so at least be over 50 per cent positive. Rock Lee just wants somene to make the choice for him. Sometimes when we're at our most broken, we just want someone to come in and tell us what to do. We want someone to come in and say "alright let's fix this.” The sad and hard part is more often than not, it's going to depend on you making the choice.

I met with my surgeon a little bit more and he's told me, "You have to choose what you want to do. Here's what I'd recommend and here's what it would look like, but you have to choose. Do you want to live with this?” And here's the here's the line that's low key haunted me the whole time through this whole process. He said; “Surgery can’t guarantee to fix any of the issues you currently have. But whatever issues you have when you get the surgery will be your new base line. So if your left arm stops working before surgery, it may never work again. Wherever you are when you have the surgery could be as good as it gets.” The surgery may not fix anything but would essentially prevent further damage.

I, like Rock Lee asked him if he would just tell me what to do. He told me he couldn’t. He said he would do it if it was him, but he couldn’t make the choice for me.

Guy-sensei responds to Rock Lee with an answer he didn’t want, but one that he needed; “If you wish to be freed of this suffering, you need to make a decision.”

The reality is that sometimes the emotional and mental strain of our brokenness can do just as much damage as physical brokenness.

“A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.”

Proverbs 17:22

I am not saying your suffering is any direct result of a sin in your life. But y'all, let's be also honest with ourselves. Some of our suffering can be consequences of our own actions. Sometimes we are dealing with the consequences of our own actions. I've been the whole time that I've been thinking back when did this start for me? Like when did my like nerve damage start? And I'm like retracing the steps and I keep looking back to the day that it started. If I've assessed my situation properly, it was me trying to over carry and push through something physically because I was stubborn and impatient, and hurt myself in the process. I think that’s what did it. I have to come to grips with that. I was like, you know, this is me being stupid. But reality is this; if it wasn't that, it would have been something else. I've never been gentle with my own life. Three years ago I was on stage throwing myself around as the Cowardly Lion doing stunts. I was over 40, doing stunts in theater. It wasn't a good life choice. I've never been gentle with myself.

Some of you need to prevent brokenness by actually starting to be gentle. You need to actually start caring for yourself as you would others. If there is brokenness in your life, that's related to your actions, your choices, then it’s time to take action and responsibility.

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” - James 5:16

Some of the worst part of this whole process for me was sitting in silence and not sharing with other people. When I started telling people, it got a little bit easier. I was sitting with Ashley from Fangirling Over Jesus as we were setting up at a con in Myrtle Beach, and she was helping me unload my T-shirts. I said, “Hey, sit down, I'm gonna tell you something.” She got mad at me because this was October and this whole process started in July. I don't think I publicly said anything to the world till like January. And it's one of those things of like, I got lighter every person I shared it with. I liked being guarded, I liked helping other people, but I didn't like people in my kool-aid. I don't like being vulnerable. I like carrying other people's stuff. Then it got personal and got hard. There's a reason why we're supposed to share with each other.

This is what the psalmist says; “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.” - Psalm 32:3

If you're hurting, say something. If people get tired of hearing it, they don't need to be the ones that are listening anyway. If you can't share with the people around you that you're hurting, they're the wrong people to have around you. There are people that will love you. There are people that will care. Even if you haven't met them yet. Don't hold back on sharing what's broken in you because you think nobody needs to hear. Stop acting like your brokenness doesn't matter. Going to share a big chunk of scripture it. It echoes that we let fear be our dictator. Fear has no basis in healthy relationships. That goes for your relationship with God and that goes for your relationship with people. If fear is a motivator, its the wrong relationship or the relationship is not in the right place.

“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” - 1 John 4:16-18

If you can't share your brokenness because you're afraid of how someone is gonna respond, that's not the place you need to be.

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” - 1 Peter 4:8

Love can cover way more than you think, and if Jesus can look at you and love you at your most broken, He'll be able to equip other people to do the same.

Some people aren't moving in love, so they don't have the capacity to love. Don't let them be the gauge to keep you from healing.

David in that same Psalm where he was talking about his brokenness, makes this prayer;

" Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” - Psalm 51:12

Our hearts aren't meant to be operating like the check engine light is on. Some of our hearts have been on check engine for a hot minute and we haven't done anything.

One verse I always cling to from Jesus is John 10:10

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

He doesn't just want you to exist. He wants you to have abundant life. He wants you to thrive beyond what's broken. He wants you to have the full quality of life.

It’s hard to have full quality of life in a broken world.

Jesus doesn't want you just to accept the lowest quality setting of life and keep it there. If it steals from you, if it's killing you, if it’s destroying you, it's not from Him. Search for the life Jesus actually wants for you.

““Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” - Matthew 11:28-30

Jesus is waiting on you to come to Him, to lay down all that is broken and take up a life that is healed. Jesus makes it clear to us that He gentle and humble in heart, and in Him we will find rest for our souls. It’s in Him that we find the healing from the brokenness we have known for so long.

In Rock Lee’s story, they fixed the medical science of ninjutsu and he gets his percentages in the positive 50s. He has his surgery and then he's doing recovery. The next time you see him he’s on crutches for a few days and then bam, he's in a ninja battle like nothing happened. Rock Lee found his healing.

Personally, I had to battle my insurance company for 5 months. I committed to do the surgery, surrendered and took a step forward, only for the insurance company to sit me back down. I blocked out/cancelled every con. I had from January to March. Insurance didn't approve my surgery. I canceled every show I had from March until May. Insurance didn't improve my surgery. At the end of May they said, hey, we can do your surgery now, right in the middle of con season. I had too much stuff between now and then to just walk away in that moment. So, I chose September 30th.

I’m publishing this devotional on September 29th. As I type this sentence, my surgery is less than 10 hours away. I hope as you are reading it, that I'm recovering well. I also hope you are recovering in all the ways you need to as well.

Take time to heal. Please understand that you have a God who loves you, who wants you to be healed, and I truly believe that the healing you're looking for, outside of just your physical conditions, you will find in a relationship with Him if you come and actually experience what He's got for you. Just like Guy-sensei and my surgeon, I can't force you to do anything. But I can tell you, that this is where I believe you'll find healing.