Day 20

Monday, March 24th

To comfort all who mourn… give them bouquets of roses instead of ashes, messages of joy instead of news of doom, a praising heart instead of a languid spirit…

They’ll rebuild the old ruins, raise a new city out of the wreckage… take the rubble left behind and make it new. 

(Isaiah 61:3-4 MSG)

Recently, I came across “The Theory of the Shattered Vase.” This theory talks about how when something traumatic happens in our lives, whether all at once or gradually, we find ourselves with nothing but shattered pieces of our old life left lying all around us. This shattering might come with a disappointed dream, a diagnosis, a divorce, or the loss of a loved one, and you don’t know how you can go on.

Or maybe, like me, it wasn’t one event and it didn’t happen all at once. Maybe you have been trying to out-run a train full of un-dealt-with trauma by pretending it isn’t there, or that it didn’t really affect you all that much. Perhaps you’ve been trying to numb it all out, to repress your way past it, but the train has caught up with you and you feel shattered. 

Our human response to a shattered life is to try desperately to put the pieces back together just the way they were before. Longing for life to “get back to the way it was before”, we get some glue and some tape and we try to turn those fragments back into their original shape. We try and we try but the glue and the tape produces nothing more than a weak and fragile vessel, not in any way like it was before.

The Theory of the Shattered Vase imagines a different response to these moments of shattering. Instead of glue and tape and the longing for the way it used to be, there is another option. 

What if we took those broken pieces of our lives and let God make something entirely new from them? Instead of a vase, a mosaic–beautiful still, but different, and much stronger than it was before.

What a beautiful picture of redemption. God can take the broken pieces of your life and make them into something new. We only need to ask Him. 

If you find yourself among the ruins of a life, sweep up all the pieces, give them to God and say, “I trust you. Make something new.”