MOSAICS: The Art That Comes From My Shattered Life
FACT: One of the hardest things you will ever hear when your life just fell apart is “God will use this!” YES… it’s true! But let’s be real, in that moment, you don’t give a flying flip! In that moment, you’re just devastated! In that moment, you just want to cry or hit something. Sometimes both. But in that moment… you need to hear this truth anyway! Whether you want to or not.
Do you ever just sit and wonder WHY? Like… “God, I’ve endured enough, why this? Why now?”
Having your life shatter is never in anyones plans. As I write this, I’m sitting in one of the largest funerals I have ever had to attend. We are in a church full of people who have been blindsided by a life gone way too soon. On the front row there is a mother… a father… a sister… a niece… all left with one less person to love on in their lives.
The musicians are singing and I’m looking around this church but I can’t stop looking at the stained glass windows next to me. They are only on one side of the church but those pieces of glass that are bonded together tell a story.
They started as dirty pieces of sand that were put into the deep flames of a furnace. As they fight through fire, they are transformed from dirty sand to smooth glass. Colors flow throughout, but a single piece of glass is not the whole story.
At some point someone takes a hammer... a saw… a blade... and that glass is cut. It’s broken and shattered and will never look the same again. The break is painful but the break is not the end either. The broken pieces are bound together with mortar; that hot, gritty, black tar that, once in place, is not easily removed from the glass. The end result is this beautiful mosaic.
The mosaics in these walls tell a story. A story of refinement, pain, and beauty. However, in the end all that’s left is the beauty.
This is the story of life.
Several weeks ago, the word “MOSAIC” hit my heart and I didn’t know why. So, I thought back on my life and the pain and beauty that has come out of it so far. There has been a healthy dose of both, and yet as I see the pieces starting to come together, I can be grateful for each cut.
When I sat in my friends living room last week as she mourned the loss of her sister, the sister whose funeral I am sitting in now, she said the word “shattered” more than once. And each time my heart wanted to speak back, “but the MOSAIC…”
The truth is, you don’t give a rip about the beautiful story your pain will tell when the hammer has just been dropped on your life. When you are in the refiners fire, you don’t care that with your story, someone might choose to walk TO Christ instead of AWAY from Him. You don’t care that the funeral service that followed your moment of being shattered will probably touch more lives then you could imagine. You don’t care because all you feel is the break and the pain.
But if it wasn’t for the break… the artist would have no reason to touch you.
The artist is what takes these shattered moments of your life and makes them into something beautiful. You can’t see the full picture, but the artist knows. Jeremiah 29:11 says, "I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you a hope and a future.” When those plans don’t look like we think they should, we get angry at God. God isn’t the one who broke you.
We live in a broken world. I hear so often people ask “Why does God allow this to happen?” The truth is, who knows! What we do know is that it is never God’s plan, but He can turn it into something beautiful in way’s only an artist can. When the world takes a hammer to your life, that’s when God picks up those pieces that will tell a story of His goodness.
Yes, in those moment you may only feel the break.
Cry. Mourn. Grieve. Allow yourself to move through all of those feelings. After all, Jesus wept too.
But also, cling to truth. Run to Christ. Let Him comfort you.
Because the mosaic is coming… the artist is not finished!