YOUR AUTHENTIC BEAUTY

 

MY VISION

I saw a deep round pottery bowl with a chipped broken side wall. As I focused on its beauty, two very large artisan hands begin painstakingly to collate various fragments and fractures layers to meld them with a gold lacquer. These broken places became solid gold repairs turning it from damaged pottery to a stunning masterpiece.

What a beautiful picture. Have we become the pottery?

I’d like to think The Lord relates to our cracks as the art form called “Kintsugu”. It’s a Japanese tradition to make pottery more valuable than the original—and as valuable as the original may have been before it was broken. 

This broken bowl could also be the picture of us prior to meeting Yashua.

It makes sense that we are fractured soul and spirit and to come into union requires mending. We are have many fragments but we are also something precious that should be highlighted with gold.  

You will be smashed like a piece of pottery— shattered so completely that there won’t be a piece big enough to carry coals from a fireplace or a little water from the well.” Isaiah 30:14

Our fragments could be consider as forgiveness of self and maybe others, and if we are putting in the work for repair these fragments are filled with gold because there is nothing instant about real redemption of growth. 

Every single person is a work in progress, and we are to embrace this fact, unafraid to now hide our scars as we do the work we do in the presence of The Lord.

“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed…”— 2 Corinthians 4:8 (NIV)

We do not need to hide the fracture lines. Rather, pay close attention to them, bring the pieces of a shattered life together, bonding them in the depth of new relational connection, and overlaying your life with gold as a greater source of beauty than it was before trauma and shame overtook it.

To have a conscious, embodied awareness of being known by God is a necessary feature of the life of loving God, and our awareness of being known by God and it becomes the degree in which we are known and loved by each other. 

There are no perfect endings and things can get messy. However, in that mess, there is meaning, and I hope you’ll agree - that not only do you have authentic beauty, you are known by GOD!🕊️