I sat on the floor staring at the remains of what was once my favorite coffee mug. The mug was a unique mug in terms of its shape. It reminded me most of Chip from Beauty and the Beast, just with a different style lip and handle. It had a very cute mustache on it with the quote, “I mustache you a question.” I could have teared up with how much I used this mug. It didn’t matter that I own about ten coffee mugs, this was the one I drank out of every morning, and here it was on the ground completely shattered. I started to gather up the pieces of the mug together again to see if I could put the mug back together again. As the pieces got smaller and smaller, I started to get frustrated and finally threw all the pieces of the mug in the garbage. Then a thought struck me, “Doesn’t God do the same thing with us?” God picks up all our broken pieces and puts us together again if we let Him. He doesn’t get frustrated with us and throw us away. He is a patient and loving Creator and Father.
We all have things that we feel completely break us down. Things that shatter our hearts and even shatter our minds to a place where we feel we cannot move along. We all have some sort of brokenness in our life. It could be broken families, broken relationships, broken self-esteem, or just anything we feel that is an attack on who we are and what we stand for. We start to allow what others think about us creep into our broken coffee mug pieces. We allow lies to circulate around our head and our heart about who we are.
When we feel broken beyond repair, like my coffee mug, it is important to rely on God and our friends to help us remember the truth about who we are. Trust me, I am just as human as everyone else and it is still hard to rely on God at times. We feel that He can’t possibly know how to help us because, surely, He doesn’t know exactly what we are feeling. However, God knows every emotion that crosses our mind because He created all of them just like He created us. He knows anger, bitterness, sadness, hopelessness, joy, happiness, contentment, and any other emotion you can think of. Good or bad, God knows how to help us with the emotions we feel. We just need to open up and allow Him to put our broken pieces back together again.
To help clarify how God uses our brokenness, I want to point out a passage in the Bible from 2 Corinthians 4:7-10;
“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves. We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.”
When we feel the broken pieces of our life start to take control, God changes those broken pieces in the same way that He transforms our hearts. He shows us how the things that we feel have broken us beyond repair, He can use to strengthen us and make us like clay jars who live our lives as a empowered followers of Christ, simply by knowing that the Maker and Creator of everything is the same One who puts us back together.
