Stay With the Broken Thing

In Brooklyn, on a recent Monday night, volunteers gathered around sewing machines and soldering irons. People walked in with broken toasters, torn jackets, dead vacuum cleaners — and walked out with things that worked again. They call them Fixit Clinics. Over 2,000 have been hosted across the United States, and the number keeps climbing. No corporate sponsor. No marketing team. Just people who decided that a broken thing deserves another look before it meets the landfill.

The clinics are a response to something most of us stopped questioning: that when something breaks, you replace it. The toaster dies. The phone slows down. The jacket tears. We don't fix. We upgrade. And the companies that make these things have engineered them that way — sealed casings, proprietary screws, software locks — so that repair feels harder than repurchase.

What struck me isn't the ingenuity of the movement. It's how unusual it seems. We've absorbed the logic of disposability so deeply that the simple act of fixing something broken now feels like resistance.

But here's where it gets quieter and more personal. We don't just discard objects. We discard relationships when they require too much work. We discard institutions when they fail us once. We discard our own plans, our own callings, even our own sense of who we are — the moment they crack under pressure. The instinct is the same. It's broken. Get a new one.

And maybe that's the most expensive habit we've developed. Not the money — though that's real. But the muscle we've lost. The muscle of patience. Of sitting with the problem long enough to understand it. Of believing that what's in front of you might be worth the effort.

The volunteers at the Fixit Clinic have a simple motto: "It's broken anyway. Why not try?"

That line has stayed with me. There's a kind of faith in it — not the religious kind, necessarily, but the human kind. The belief that brokenness is not the end of the story. That the thing in your hands still has something left to give, if someone is willing to stay with it.

I think about the things — and the people — I've been too quick to write off. The friendship I let go because it got awkward. The idea I abandoned because the first version failed. The parts of myself I treat as disposable rather than mendable.

Scripture says the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Maybe that extends further than we think. Maybe God doesn't discard either.

Some things can't be fixed. That's true, and it's worth saying plainly. But most things can. We just stopped trying.

What's the last broken thing you stayed with?