Friends, you okay? I know I left you all on a cliffhanger there. We were getting into some heavy stuff. That’s the thing; brokenness is messy.
Have you ever dropped a glass coffee cup? It hits the ground, and it just shatters into hundreds of pieces. A couple of days go by, and you are still finding small pieces of glass, even after you swept & vacuumed. Hopefully, you didn’t step on a piece of glass when you found it.
Broken Coffee Cups
Broken coffee cups have a lot in common with personal brokenness. Something happens, a traumatic event, a pandemic, a heartbreak, a betrayal, a loss, etc. When that impact happens, we are broken into hundreds of pieces.
What do we do? How do we fix it? How can we be made whole again?
There are three options:
You can try to piece the coffee cup back together. Good luck finding all the tiny pieces though. Even if you have 95% of the pieces, the cup is useless now.
You can grab a broom, sweep up the broken pieces and throw the “cup” away. You’re over it! Done! But every time you find a piece from the cup, you get mad. It’s a bitter reminder of the coffee cup you once had.
You take the broken pieces, handle them with care to avoid more brokenness and hurt, and release it to the Lord. With His help together create something new and beautiful that is whole once again.
Wait, are we still talking about a coffee cup???
My Brokenness
2020 spared no mercy and left me in a broken hot mess. My marriage ended in divorce after 8 years, I experienced Covid, a pandemic almost took out my business, and I almost lost my Dad in the Fall of 2020. This was not part of my plan, God!
I tried figuring things out on my own. I isolated myself from friends and family because of the shame I felt from my broken marriage. I tried piecing my life back together, but the cracks and holes no matter how much I tried to hide them were still visible.
There was a point where I just threw my hands up in the air and said, “I’m done, God! I give up! I don’t care anymore. I’m done!” Doing this did more harm than good. While “sweeping and picking up the broken pieces” on my own, it only hurt me more. Months later, I would find a “broken piece” it would send me down that dark spiral again.
Finally, when the time was right, true surrender happened, and healing began. I no longer wanted to piece back together my old “coffee cup”, or throw away the pieces to the broken cup; no instead, with the Lord’s help we created a new and stronger “coffee cup.”
Do you guys remember our friend Saul/ Paul? I shared a little bit of his story in my last post. He was a persecutor of the early church, and after an encounter with the Lord, Paul became God’s “chosen instrument” to minister to the Gentiles and the Roman Empire. Paul experienced hardship. He experienced brokenness.
Paul was in prison when he wrote this to the church of Ephesus,
“Now it’s time to be made new by every revelation that’s been given to you. And to be transformed as you embrace the glorious Christ-within as your new life and live in union with him. For God has re-created you all over again in his perfect righteousness, and you now belong to him in the realm of true holiness.”
This passage shares the beauty of what God can do with the broken pieces in our lives.
To be broken and transformed into something NEW!
Did you know that all of our Margrit Co. jewelry lines are created out of recycled glass? We break the glass down, melted, poured into molds that are then cut and drilled into the pieces we use to make our jewelry.
When we receive our glass, we have to break it down, even more, to go through the transformation process to become something new. This process can be tedious; there are times that the glass breaks in the process, and we have to start back at square one. However, we never discard the glass. It still has a purpose. The glass is broken down once again, melted and molded, and finally transformed into a beautiful piece of jewelry.
Do you get where I’m going with this, friends?
There is purpose in the brokenness. What you do with your pieces afterward is up to you. My challenge to you is this, don’t let your broken pieces defeat or define you. They will always have a part in your story, but take them and place them in the Father’s hands and say to the Lord, “Transform me, take my broken pieces and make me whole.”