| About Michael Roberts | Michael Roberts is a Christian singer/songwriter from Waynesboro, MS whose desire is to reach the hurting and the broken with the truth of God’s unconditional love, and the hope of redemption through Jesus Christ. Through the gift of music, Michael also seeks to edify fellow believers and encourage them in their walk with Christ. Along the sometimes turbulent journey of his life, Michael has learned to appreciate the fact that it is often the burned bridges and the closed roads that best lead a soul to its destiny in Christ. To struggle against the hand and the will of God only leads to heartbreak and utter despair. But, as the circle goes, heartbreak and despair, with the proper response, sends a broken soul on a collision course with the mender of brokenness, and the healer of despair. Michael penned the song ‘Broken China’ as a testament to the fact that God’s restorative love is the exclusive, absolute remedy for the soul that has found itself outside the parameters of belonging that we often rely on as our Christian identity. It is far too often the case that a ‘believer’ finds his or herself teetering on the blurred edge of Christian reality, and the church (the Keeper of the China Store), despite its best efforts, somehow doesn’t even notice as they begin to slip silently away. Suddenly, these wanderers-from-the faith find themselves swept back into a cruel environment from which they have only just recently escaped; only now it is a colder, harsher climate in which they struggle to survive. Satan then uses the swift, hateful, hustle and bustle of this sin-stricken world to throw them mercilessly underfoot and trample their hopes, and their dreams, and even their identity to shards, utterly using them up until there is seemingly nothing redeemable left of them. Astonishingly though, Jesus Christ doesn’t even flinch at coming to this place of shame to minister to the broken. It is here, at this dark, dismal, hopeless end, that Christ’s best works are done. It is in the deepest, coldest, harshest, blackest depths that His light of hope shines the brightest. It is in one’s end-of-the-rope, all-bets-off, totally, miserably broken state that Christ relishes at the prospect of offering healing, mending, and deliverance. To find God’s redemption is awesome. To find one’s self at odds with the One who once redeemed you, and outside of the safety and support of the family of God, is frightening and harsh. To end up shattered and clawing for one’s life in a dank, filthy gutter of sin and despair is terrifying. But to feel the warmth and the strength of God’s capable hand as He brushes away the hurt, and lovingly and meticulously smoothes on the soothing balm of redemption is indescribable. There are no words to convey the feeling when the broken, shattered vessel finds itself the apple of the Broken China Mender’s eye. It is through the experience of finding Christ as a child, wandering from his relationship with Christ as an adult, making all the wrong choices, finding himself broken and hopeless, bound and imprisoned by sin, and at the very end of hope, and then, against all odds, finding refuge, healing and spiritual restoration at the hands of a merciful Savior, that a testimony of hope and healing has been born in Michael. It is Michael’s earnest hope that others may feel the depth and texture of his scars, listen to his poignant story of near demise, and grasp the enormity of the mercy of God, the champion of his soul, and therein find the path, and the will, to fall into the arms of God as the redeemer and the preserver of their souls. |
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