Broken

Broken
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
 
There is a beautiful song called “Image of God” that I stumbled across a number of years ago. The artists are Christa Wells and Nicole Witt. I highly recommend looking it up on YouTube if you get a chance. The refrain says this:
 
“We come in pieces, we come in fragments,
We come discolored to the foot of the cross;
Our maker sees us, all that we have been,
Binds us together, the image of God.”
 
I envy people who can write in such hauntingly beautiful pictures as that. It is a perfect depiction of what God does for us, both individually and corporately. Each of us is shattered. We are ruined by sin, broken by our bad choices, battered by what the world has done to us. We have our sorrows and our losses; we have our mistakes; and we have the day-to-day, never-ending weariness of living in a world that is as broken as we are.
 
But like the potter of Scripture, our Creator sees the beauty waiting to be found in us. He is, after all, the One who made us, isn’t He? He knows far better than we do what we can become. And so He gently lays hold of each of us. He binds up our shattered hearts, minds, and lives. Over and over again, he recreates us. And each time we become more beautiful than we were before. I suppose theologians would call that sanctification, but it doesn’t really need a label. It is our Master molding and shaping us, loving us from brokenness into beauty.
 
And then, He takes those creations and draws them together, and from them He builds His Church. From our humanity, from our failures, and from our pain, He makes us something beyond beautiful. He forms us into His own image, created to share our broken beauty with a world that cries out in pain and loneliness and forgottenness. He calls us, His church, to bring those shattered bits of His people to Him, so that He can love them, too, into something stunning and precious.
 
On days when you feel like so many bits of glass, remember that our Maker has restless fingers. He is ever creating, ever molding, ever mending us, making us both beautiful and useful to Him. And we are called to show this beauty—His glory—to the world he longs to heal.
 
Know today that you are being made beautiful, over and over and over again.
 
Peace.
 
Jackie