Pick Up the Pieces

Sometimes, I’m clumsy. I have dropped glasses and bowls, and they have shattered. My next move is to yell out a warning to anyone in the vicinity. “Get back! I broke something. There are sharp pieces everywhere!” Then I pull out the broom and dust pan and sweep all of the pieces up and put them in the trash. After sweeping, I’m still cautious. I might have missed a shard of glass. I don’t want to step on one unexpectedly.

Back when I started this blog, I shared that at times I’ve felt broken. Shattered even. Beyond repair. I’ve spent much of my time lately focused on improving my mental, spiritual, physical, and financial health. I’ve been focused on taking the broken pieces of my life and rebuilding a new existence. I’m working on being whole.

When I attended The Haven Retreat in Utah, we participated in a moving activity. The Japanese practice the art of kintsugi. In kintsugi, they take broken pottery and fuse them back together with liquid silver or gold. The broken pottery is not deemed useless the moment that it breaks. As a matter of fact, repairing it with precious metal makes it more valuable than it ever was before it was broken.

We were given an array of clay pots to choose from. Then, we took a hammer and broke the pot into pieces. We didn’t use real gold, but we mixed a golden, shimmery dust into our glue. Now the real work began. Breaking the pots was easy. Repairing them required patience. You had to hold each piece in place until it was firmly attached. If you let go too soon, it would fall apart.

So with soft music playing in the background and a gorgeous mountain landscape as a backdrop, we got to work on repairing our broken pots. Our pots were all broken in different ways. Some had lots of pieces. Others had fewer pieces, but we were all building our pottery bit by bit.

What a wonderful reminder for me. Even though my life has shattered at times, I’m not useless. I don’t have to be swept up and put in the trash. My broken pieces are being put back together by God, the Greatest Potter. The brokenness in my life didn’t destroy me. God is using his golden hand to mend me and make me more valuable than I was before I fell into all those tiny pieces. I won’t look like I did before, and that’s okay. The pieces may not all go back the way that they were originally, and that’s okay too. As long as God is doing the mending, I’m satisfied.