God, the Master Artist, looks at the shards of our brokenness and sees beauty that we can’t. God uses the brokenness and creates a new, beautiful mosaic.
I don’t know anyone in this world who has escaped brokenness. I know I haven’t. In fact, brokenness touched my life in profound ways early on in my life. I spent most of my adult life thus far trying to hide how broken I was, but once I began to acknowledge all the scattered pieces of me laying all around, I found myself desperate to find a way to put the pieces of me back together.
I found myself on a journey towards healing from childhood sexual abuse. But every time I thought I had finally fit two pieces of me back together, I would see a new pile of all that was shattered in a corner I didn’t see before. I pleaded with God to put me back together. After all, He promises “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3, ESV). Surely healing meant He would put me back together.
As I have walked this journey, I have come to understand healing isn’t what I envisioned it would be. I thought of healing as God putting the broken pieces of me back together like a puzzle. While I can’t possibly put all the countless pieces of me back into the places they were before, I was certain God could. Yet, He hasn’t. His healing isn’t about putting me back together. It’s about making the old new.
His healing isn’t about putting me back together. It’s about making the old new. Click To Tweet
The problem with putting the pieces back together is that once the pieces were fitted where they were to begin with, they provide an appearance of wholeness yet are still fractured. A puzzle put together still breaks in the same places. It appears whole, you see the entire picture the pieces come together to create, yet it’s perpetually broken, fractured forever. God’s healing won’t put the pieces back together to give me an appearance of wholeness while leaving me still broken. So what is He doing instead?
God isn’t putting me together like a puzzle. When He looks at the chaotic mess of my scattered shards, He sees a new work of art as only an Artist can. He not only sees this new work of art, He begins creating it. He picks up each broken piece of me, lovingly cleans it and polishes it, and He places it in its new place in the mosaic He is making out of me.
When He looks at the chaotic mess of my scattered shards, He sees a new work of art... Click To Tweet
A mosaic, you see, is made by taking broken pieces and arranging them into a work of art held in place by some kind of glue or cement. That glue holds all those broken pieces together as one work of art. It is whole yet comprised of what was once broken. But the eyes of the artist saw beauty in the midst of the broken, and created something new out of what once was old. Unlike a puzzle, a mosaic, though made of broken pieces, is completely whole. It is held together, cemented in place, so it can’t be taken apart.
God, the Master Artist, looks at the shards of my brokenness and sees beauty that I can’t. The abuse that broke me cannot be undone (trust me, I’ve tried), but God uses the brokenness and creates a new mosaic. He doesn’t place all those shattered pieces back where they once were to create the appearance of wholeness. No, He does more than that. He honors the story of each broken piece, polishing it off, and places it in the glue of His grace and mercy and love. That glue can never be broken again. Out of old, broken pieces, He is fashioning a beautiful, new mosaic.
Of course, the brokenness can be seen and each shard still has a story to tell, but the glue of His faithfulness holding all the pieces together creates a whole piece of art that tells of His goodness through the brokenness. It tells of a love that refuses to leave me shattered. Healing is not putting the pieces of me back together. It’s much greater than that. Healing is making a new work of art…wholeness made out of brokenness.
...the glue of His faithfulness holding all the pieces together creates a whole piece of art... Click To Tweet
As I said at first, I don’t know of anyone in this life who has escaped brokenness, and I don’t know what it is that broke you and left you in pieces. So my dear and precious sisters, broken and scattered, take heart. He is not putting the old you back together. He is not merely fitting pieces of an old puzzle back where they once were so all can see where you broke.
He loves you too much to leave you with the appearance of wholeness yet perpetually broken. He is taking all the broken pieces of who you used to be and artfully creating a new masterpiece, telling a story of how you are being put back together…a story of how where you have walked will shape who you become. You, my dear sister, are not a puzzle to be fit back together into the old. You are a mosaic being masterfully made new.
