Broken

     They were all she had left of her father. A few pieces of pottery, shaped by his hands on the potter’s wheel. It was all that remained of his life of nearly eighty years. Every piece had been glazed with a bright color and her father’s initials were scratched on the underside of each one. She proudly displayed them on a little shelf she had fashioned from an old piece of lumber she found in the garage.
     Every week, while cleaning the house, she would carefully remove each vessel from the shelf and dust it inside and out. Touching the smooth glaze on the outside and the chalky gray inside brought back visions of her father’s endless hours fashioning each piece on the spinning wheel. Today was no different. One by one she started to move down the line of precious keepsakes. When she reached for the third one her dust cloth caught the end of the shelf and tipped it upward. Before she realized it or could do anything to stop it every one of the honored vases, bowls and plates spilled onto the hard wooden floor shattering into what seemed like a million shards of broken clay.
     Immediately her eyes filled with warm tears. She collapsed in a heap onto an old wooden chair, feeling as broken as the pottery which surrounded her feet. She looked in disbelief at what was left of her father’s legacy. But the longer she looked through her bleary eyes, unable to focus in their normal way, the more she was convinced she saw something among the rubble. The colors on each of the clay pieces, broken into a myriad of shapes and sizes, seemed, through the tears to be forming a beautiful picture. A mosaic of randomness and yet an eerie beauty reminiscent of what she had seen on occasion when looking through a kaleidoscope.
The longer she looked, the more beautiful it became…and then a small voice seemed to speak from deep inside of the mysterious mess on the floor. “You are never so broken, never so destroyed or removed from your original purpose or My plans for your life that I cannot make something wonderful, something divinely glorious out of what you see as disastrous and worthless.”
     Sitting back in the chair she continued to stare at the floor until the tears cleared from her eyes and the scattered pieces came back into focus. She tried to tear up again so that she could once again see the beauty but it was gone. The tears were gone and so was the beauty.
    

     When tears come, somehow in the mysterious way of the Divine comes an image which can only be seen while the tears are there. Never despise the tears. Embrace the moment, enjoy God’s perspective of brokenness, and thank Him that within every shattered moment there is beauty.