Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. In addition to being a method of pottery repair, it’s also a philosophy, that treats breakage and repair as part of an object’s story, rather than something to disguise or to be ashamed of. The scars of being broken then become aspects of real beauty in the rebuilt articles. Such golden adhesive results in items that become more valuable after their near destruction than before they were dropped or smashed.
But this is nothing new to those of us who know our Bibles. Speaking of our bodies and lives as delicate containers of God’s glorious grace, St Paul said; ‘We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure’. (2 Corinthians 5:7 NLT) The more cracks there are, the more that light shines through!
Rebuilt clay pots may still bear the marks of their ordeal, rather like my scars after 22 years of serious disease and multiple surgeries. But, in the same way as Kintsugi makes the item more valuable after its repair than before, when God rebuilds a broken heart, he gives us new hope and a new future.
With Jesus, there is always the possibility of a new start. Our scars then become a reminder, not of just how hard life has been, but of the depth from which God has lifted us. They point forward as well as backward and proclaim ‘I may not be what I would like to be, but I am not what I was’.
