This is what we do with broken things

He couldn’t know that the glass he broke was something thrifted, or from the dollar store, I don’t remember which. And as a first time dinner guest at my in-laws house he was busy apologizing over the wine glass and offering to replace it, not really believing my mother in law’s gracious edict not to worry about it.

I could see he was still worried, this friend of ours. So I beckoned with my head and said, “Come on. Let me show you what they do with broken things around here.“

This mosaic is at least 50% tragically broken dishes. In a house with 9 children and 4 visiting grand children broken dishes are in abundant supply.

My mother in law saved broken dishes for several years, some of them wedding treasures, some of them dollar store purchases, but she saved all the pieces and then with a few friends created this fantastic mosaic from them all.

Originally she intended it as a table, but it was too heavy, so now it decorates the front entry way.

It was an accidental phrase, “This is what we do with broken things.” But as I stood there  I realized just how true it is. Not just what they do with broken things, but broken people as well.

Here they gather up broken pieces, broken lives, and help lay them out in such a way as to find the beauty still there, and the patterns that bring a sense of order and place within a larger story.

I know because I personally have benefited from this slow, methodical, laying out of broken bits and learning to see them in a different light, to find the beauty possible in them.

Very few things are so far broken that a creative enough artist can’t turn them into something beautiful.

No life is so far broken that a creative and redemptive God can’t lay the pieces of it out in such a way that it’s beauty and worth are visible again.

That is what the people of God are to do. We participate in gathering up the broken pieces of this world, and laying them out again. Not the way they were before, but as something new, something better, a unity of parts that forms a more beautiful picture than we started with.

That’s how redemption works. This is how our lives can look if we’re willing to lay all the pieces on the table and let the master artist rearrange them.

This is what He does with broken things. All it takes from us is trust, and perhaps some courage as well.

Have you ever had something in your life that seemed to be beyond repair, only to watch God make something beautiful out of it in unexpected ways? Will you share it with us? This is one of mine. Grace Wins