He Picks Up The Pieces

 

         

         A friend tells the story of his visit to an ancient cathedral in Ireland where he saw a window that inspired him.  He considered the immense number of tiny pieces of glass necessary to create the beautiful picture of Jesus surrounded by people from all walks of life who sat around his feet listening to him speak. The tiny broken pieces represented the very different and broken lives each person encounters during their journey on earth.  Yet using all the broken, jagged edged pieces, a magnificent and beautiful art work emerged.

There are times in our lives we all face brokenness, sometimes even to the point of being shattered into a million pieces. We may face the death of a loved one, separation from a child, a chronic illness, divorce, financial devastation or a hundred other ways our world gets torn apart.  Sometimes it’s even because of bad decisions!

I’ve dropped a drinking glass, plate or other fragile ornament onto the kitchen floor and it’s gone; just gone.  I remember I’d found a beautiful treasure in a thrift store a few years back. It was a glass pitcher that looked ancient.  (It may have been just a replica, but it was beautiful and my husband bought it for me.)  All bagged up and paid for, we walked out of the store and my husband dropped the the bag with the pitcher, onto the asphalt.  

Needless to say it went into splinters; thankfully entirely contained within the bag.  My husband was crushed.  I immediately assumed we would just trash it; after all who could put it back together again?  Adamantly my husband said, “No! I’ll fix it!”

That splintered pitcher is still in the bag, in hundreds of bits, but I still have it.  My husband hasn’t had the time or inclination to ever begin trying to ‘think about’ putting it back together. I’m not sure, even if he started, he’d be able to.  But God’s not like that.  He knows every time we get shredded to pieces, either by others, or even by ourselves.  

The Kingdom Heirs sing a song, “Pieces" —-one of my favorites. There are times when I'm hurting, broken, sad, whatever....and think of that song; picture me in splinters all over the place and know that God has the unique ability to pick every fragment that is on the ground and put it back together. This is such a gift and I am grateful to know, and serve, a God who loves me that much!   (This is the you tube link for the song mentioned.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8i-7NOpFw     

Someone suggested that not only can God put our pieces back together, but that each community is filled with many  pieces, ‘fragments’ among many.  God pulls all the pieces together in specific ways and places, to create special bonds, making amazing pictures in each of our lives.  These pictures are what the world around us sees.  

        I wonder, do the pictures we create as a community, look anything like the beautiful pictures we see in the those windows that grace so many church windows?  Or, do we let the the tiny splinters distort the image?

 https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/jesus-teaching-stained-glass.html