Doves On Distant Oaks

Broken Vessels

There is a practice in the Japan called Kintsugi, which means "golden joinery." Evidently it began many years ago in the 15th century when a military governor broke his favorite Chinese tea bowl. He sent it back to China to be repaired. At the time this was done by drilling small holes next to the crack and inserting staples. The man was so upset by the ugly appearance that he asked a local craftsman to do a better job. The craftsman filled the cracks with a resin sprinkled with gold dust. From there, the practice of Kintsugi began, which doesn't try to hide the cracks, but highlights them and makes the vessel more valuable.

Our relationship with God is like that. None of us are free of cracks, and some of us have become so broken that we feel nothing can ever put us back together again. But with God, all things are possible. We may be hard pressed, perplexed, persecuted, and struck down, but the light of Jesus in us allows God to not only put every piece of us back together, but to fill those cracks with something more precious.

The key is to let Him. Often, when we are lying splintered, shattered, and fragmented on the ground, we just want to lay there as our thoughts turn to the hopelessness of our situation. It may be because of a strained or broken relationship, the loss of someone dear, a financial crisis, addiction, physical impairment, disease or other health adversity ... the list goes on. We've all been there, looking upward from our broken position, wondering how this could happen to me. We sometimes blame God and even turn our backs on Him.

Yet, God's love is so unconditional that even if we have, He will scoop up the pieces and put us back together, if we would only call to him to do so. He will not abandon us because we carry what Paul calls the death of Christ, which is to say, the power of the resurrected Christ of whom we bear witness. Instead of hiding our cracks we should openly show them as a testimony. And if we profess to love God as he first loved us, then we should never side-step a broken person like they were some jar that has fallen off the shelf and shattered. A loving church finds it in their hearts to actually go out of their way to find the broken, the desperate, and the hopeless.

No matter how wounded or how broken, we know that we hold great value, regardless of the situation in which we find ourselves. Allow God to fill in the cracks of our lives. While we may cry out for Him in our brokenness, or petition Him on behalf of someone else, it is not by our own power any of us are repaired.

He is the potter, we are the clay.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.–2 Corinthians 4:7-10

Keywords: Brokenness, Hopelessness, Persecution

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