kintsugi

Earlier today, I was Face-Timing with my best friend when she suddenly asked if I had ever heard of something called kintsugi. I shook my head, thinking perhaps it was some anime she'd perhaps gotten into recently. Her eyes lit up with excitement as she explained that it was a Japanese art where one would collect and take broken pottery and fill in the cracks with powdered gold so that the new product was worth more than it had been before. The word kintsugi literally means "to patch with gold." The philosophy behind this art is that it treats all the cracks and imperfections about that piece of pottery as a part of its history rather than a flaw that needed to be hidden.

As she continued explaining, my mind was taking this powerful imagery and running in every direction with all the analogies I could draw from it, but finally, it landed on one simple word:

Redemption.

Old made new? Wait, but not only that. Worthless made beautiful. For some, kintsugi ties back to certain Buddhist concepts of seeing beauty in impermanence, but for me, all I could think about were our lives in the Hands of the Potter. As humans, we have a tendency to try and fix whatever seems broken and useless and more often than not, we fail to do so and scramble to hide and disguise the ugliness in the aftermath of it all. Truth be told, we are broken and cracked in all aspects--far from redeeming. But God looked down upon us in His great mercy, picked up each shattered shard and put us back together, piece-by-piece. Each jagged edge is lined and held together by grace. Yes, broken and beautiful because He looked and saw that these imperfections were not to be hidden but that in all things, He would use them for His glory. 

Mmm yes, the beauty in being redeemed and refined. To God be all the glory for what He's done and will do.