Broken Pieces

Ceramic glaze is used not only to strengthen and harden pottery, but to beautify it as well. I heard one time that one of the ways that they make glaze is to add the powdered fragments of broken pottery into the mixture. Often, when we’re picking up the pieces of our broken hearts, we mourn the loss of something that was once so strong and beautiful and capable of holding the light and warmth of our love and our hopes and our dreams. We may ask why we invested so much of ourselves into something so fragile and breakable. We may wonder what good could possibly come of this. But when we turn and offer the broken pieces of our heart to the Lord, He will offer us a new heart, but that is not all. He does not simply throw the old pieces away. He adds them into the glaze for our new heart, making our new heart stronger and tougher and more beautiful. As often as our hearts get broken, we can offer them to the Lord, and He will honor our sacrifice and our sorrow and our pain and He will transform them into a beautiful, luminous, protective shield for the new heart he has prepared for us. And every time that glaze made from the broken fragments of our hearts gets stronger and more beautiful. None of our pain or our heartbreaks is ever wasted. Christ, the Master Sculptor, will always be there to put us back together more perfectly than we could have imagined.