Broken and Better

By Lynn Mosher−

Would you ever think that something broken could be better, more beautiful, or more valuable?

I came across this wonderful process used by the Japanese. Maybe you’ve seen if before. It’s called kintsugi (meaning golden joinery) or kintsukuroi (meaning golden repair).

The story has two or so versions, but the one used the majority of the time is this one…

In the 15th-century, a governing official or general named Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke a tea bowl and sent it to China to be repaired. When the bowl came back, metal staples held it together. Disappointed, he attempted to come up with a better, more attractive way to repair broken pottery.

His discovery? Adding gold dust to an adhesive resin to repair it improved the appearance. This process emphasized the cracks and made them more appealing. The discovery became known as kintsugi or kintsukuroi. The process attempts to create something beautiful out of the broken and imperfect.

While we, in our society, throw out the old and trash the broken, the Japanese consider a repaired piece to be elevated to a whole new level of appreciation. In fact, they have been known to purposely break a vessel of pottery just so it can be repaired.

They cherish the imperfection of a broken pot repaired in this way, seeing it as a creative rebirth to the pot’s life story. They consider that, when something suffers damage, it then has a history, and it becomes more beautiful and valuable.

The gold repair brings beauty out of the brokenness. Not as good as new…but better! Brand new!

Doesn’t God do the same for our brokenness? He…

* mends the broken into beauty
* molds the flaws into flawlessness
* renews the useless into usefulness
* shapes the wanting into wholeness
* transforms the worthless into worthy

I don’t remember who said this but it’s so true, “God loves you as you are but He loves you too much to leave you where you are.” He’s the Repairman. He uses the gold of His love, grace, mercy, and compassion to mend your broken heart, broken relationships, broken attitudes, broken marriages, broken past, broken dreams, broken health, and whatever else that may be broken in your life.

He uses the same gold that lavishly adorned His temple. The gold of pure worth and holiness. He fills in all those cracks, breaks, crevices, rifts, chinks, chips, and gaps in your life’s temple, those wrecked, devastating, and fractured moments, those broken pieces of your life, and gives you renewed strength, attitude, effort, and character, transforming you into something more beautiful for having been broken and repaired.

Joining you to Christ to make you into something far more valuable.

Have pieces of your life been broken away? Has God put the pieces back together again, making you more beautiful and giving a new life story? Do you see value in your life you did not see before?

Oh, let us seek that bond of golden joinery!

“We who believe are carefully joined together
with Christ as parts of a beautiful, constantly
growing temple for God.”
Eph. 2:21 TLB

Photo credit: http://www.vtwonen.nl/tag/servies/