the beauty of broken glass

Last week at Torch, my friend Erica was teaching - and she shared this really cool word-picture of how God works in our lives sometimes. If there are impurities in the clay that a potter uses to make something, when it's fired, it will explode, and what you're left with are all these hard pieces of useless pottery - except there's this thing, I forget what it's called, and it's full of soft clay, and the potter will toss all the pieces into it, and over time as the hard broken bits of pottery are mixed in with the soft clay, they become soft and remoldable - useful again.

Of late, for various reasons, I've felt like so many pieces of shattered pottery - as if God has taken me off the shelf and purposefully dropped me on the floor, or as if I've been in that firing place, and simply exploded. There's reason to it - things to learn, ways to grow, stuff that just needs to be remade in me, I think - and so I am glad for it, but... well, ouch...

As I was sharing some of that last night with the band I'll be playing with this weekend, one of the guys told me something I don't think I will ever forget; it was just such a cool image. He told me about this friend of his who has a coffee table and the surface of it is made entirely of bits of broken glass. Each piece on its own is beautiful in and of itself, but then you put them all together and it's just incredible.

It is incredible, isn't it? Dozens of pieces of broken, useless, rejected glass - seen through an artist's eyes as something worth saving. Re-created, given a new function, and made beautiful. Sounds a little bit like a great Story, don't you think? :)

I may have discovered my art project for the summer...