When Broken Works Best

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’. 

 

Second Chance Scenario

My mind was clawing its way slowly back to clarity.  I knew that I was in hospital and that I was desperately ill.  It was February, a few years ago, and I had been to the brink.  Among my early conscious moments after a long period of deep coma I heard two nurses talking.  They were asking each other if either of them had received any Valentine Day cards.  Gradually I caught on, and realised that I had missed this annual opportunity to tell Diane how much she means to me.  I do tell her that every day, of course, but weeks of hospitalisation had robbed us of the daily hugs and reassurance that are part of the paintwork of our marriage.  So I dreamed up a solution.  When my friend Bob came to see me I asked him to buy a rose for Diane and send it to her as if it had come from me.  The only problem was that I couldn't speak.  I tried to write down my instructions and thought I had done so clearly, but years later he showed me the card on which I had scrawled a meaningless array of scratches and lines.  But, he twigged it and realised what I was asking him to do for me.

When Diane received a single red rose later that day she was moved to tears.  I had hardly spoken to her for weeks and was still lying in ICU full of wires and monitors.  'To my darling Diane, from your loving husband' my friend Bob had written.  Through her tears and sobs, she tells me, my wife began to hope that I might come back again from the valley of the shadow of death.  And I did.  God was so gracious to us.  He gave us back to one another  and allowed us to share again in a relationship that has been so special since the very first day we saw one another, February 29th 1968 - leap year day.

So - you can imagine how special Valentine's Day is to us each year.  A simple single red rose tells us both that we serve the God of the Second Chance!  Each year we look at that little flower and remember the One who says 'I will restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten!'  This year more than ever, we are so grateful for that understanding.