Last night I broke the sugar bowl. Not just any sugar bowl. The sugar bowl with sentimental value. It wasn't an expensive piece of pottery, nor was it particularly pretty. In fact, it bordered on the ugly, if not outright obnoxious. But to me it was wonderful; because of the warm and happy sentiments that it represented. While its story involves my grandmother, my best friend, and an ugly teapot, I won't bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that I was devastated when the little bowl smashed to bits.
The truly frustrating part of the whole ordeal is that just 15 minutes before its untimely demise, I had prevented the bowl from breaking as it fell off a shelf. I had just finished cleaning up the spilt sugar and was returning the sugar bowl to its home on the cupboard, when it slipped again and shattered on the counter. There was a sickening 'pop' and a scattering of pottery. I instantly felt sick to my stomach, as tears welled up in my eyes. (And anyone who knows me well knows that I don't cry.)
And while I plan to glue the the pieces back together, I cannot put sugar in it anymore. The little bowl with the gaudy butterfly will never be the same again.
We are all broken pieces of pottery. God the Father is the potter who formed us out of the clay. This fallen, fractured world jostles us about, weakening, wearing us down, chipping at us. Sometimes the choices we make cause us to crack. Sometimes those choices cause us to totter, to fall, and to shatter.
When my dear little sugar bowl smashed across the laminate counter top, my heart was sick. To our Heavenly Father we are so much more valuable than a silly sugar bowl. Does He feel a wrenching loss in His heart, magnified by infinity, when we get ourselves into scrapes, when we totter on the edge, when we challenge His sovereignty? Countless times He has kept us from trouble, shielded us from pain. At times, He has cleaned up the messes we make. But still we insist on forging ahead, tempting destruction yet again.
And then there are the times when the circumstances we find ourselves in are not of our own making. But they can crush us, nonetheless. Does the Lord of Heaven, Who imagined galaxies and spoke them into existence, weep and agonize over our broken state? Does His heart feel sick for us?
I believe so. But He does not abandon us to our fractured condition. Regardless of the cause of our brokenness, Christ came to put us back together. After all, 'through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.' Who better to mend the broken pieces. He Himself is the glue that bonds the fragments our renewed spirit: 'He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.'
We certainly will not be as we were before. Like my little bowl, we will be unable to hold the same things again.
Unlike my little bowl, we will be filled with His Spirit (which is infinitely better than being filled with sugar).
