When I got home from training camp in May I tried to describe what happened when Kingdom hit me that week and the best I could do was this:
“An atomic bomb went off inside me and shattered the pretty glass box I had God and myself in. Now there’s shattered glass everywhere and I keep walking on it to clean up the mess and try to put the pieces back together… all the while I’m bleeding on everyone around me!“
A hard conversation with a friend made me realize God wants me to step back and let him pick up the pieces one by one to make a new mosaic out of my life…
10 times more beautiful than anything I had constructed over the last 24 years.
Then a week or so before I left, a dear friend (never hearing of my metaphor in may) felt led to send this to me in an email after praying that morning.
He walked with purpose along the beach
hunting for fragments of glass
the waves had tossed up on the shore.
He would stoop here and there
to pick up a broken piece
and put it carefully in his drawstring bag.
He was in no hurry
searching out the smallest
shattered shards.
Satisfied he had found all the pieces
he took his bag of precious fragments
back to his workshop.
Surrounded by shining
translucent works of art
he lovingly and gently
emptied the bag on his workbench.
With utmost patience and care
he set about creating
a beautiful work of art
a stained glass window
a mosaic
that would glow and come alive
as the sun shone through.
Not even the smallest crushed pieces were discarded
those creating special depth and richness
in the artisan’s skilled hand.
All confirming that this year is a season of God picking up the shattered glass of my former life. Including my expectations of who He is and what He is capable of, the false identity I have found in anything besides Him, and so SO much more!!!
Another picture God has given me this week as we’ve begun doing life and ministry together in Ireland is that I’m a snake trying to shed her old, tight, itchy scales so that the new fresh skin can breath! In order for snakes to shed their skin they have to rub up against rocks and bushes. Sometimes this leaves bruises or scratches, it’s just a part of the process. I’ve got plenty of rocks and bushes comin my way this year (literally and figuratively) to take off this skin!
So much of this year, along side loving a broken world, will be God recreating my heart and mind to be more like His. To realign my will and desires with his, to give me His eyes, to give me His ears. To allow my heart to break for what breaks His.
This and so much more I hope is the new skin, the new mosaic of my life.
And then, hopefully, when that skin gets too tight and that mosaic loses its beauty due to its normalcy, God will give me more rocks and shatter me once again.
“For we are God’s handiwork, recreated in Christ Jesus, that we may do those good works which God predestined for us, that we should walk in them.”
