The Box

So many young people live with the scars of their past. For some the wounds are so deep that they think they can never overcome them, and thus they choose to hold their broken pieces in their hands. For other’s, the scars are something they try so hard to hide, things that have happened that they don’t want the world to know, so they take their broken pieces and attempt to glue them back together like a child who broke their mother’s favorite vase. But the glued vase will leak. And yet for others, those scars are a testimony. A tribute to a loving and wonderful God and a reminder of just how magnificant, powerful, and loving he is. Those are the people that pick up their broken pieces, hold them for a bit and realize that they can’t glue them back together, so they hand them to God to do what he wants with them. I am one of those people.

Over the years of my life, I have endured wounds to both the flesh and the spirit. Wounds that were deep, hurtful, and that shattered the masterpiece God was working on. For many years I prayed to be rescued from certain situations. Almost like a princess praying that her prince would come. I didn’t understand things I was going through at the time. I couldn’t see beyond my pain. I didn’t understand why my dad was out of my life, why my birth mother was self centered and abusive, and why my grandparents were so controlling. I didn’t understand why when I went looking for love, I got met with abuse. Or why I lost a baby at 16 only to learn days later that I had cancer. There was so much that happened in my life that broke me, that I couldn’t understand.

Years later I learned why God had allowed me to walk through the fires and pain. I began to understand that through my youth, he was making me into what he wanted me to be. Not what I thought I needed to be. There was a song I would always sing as a child that talks about God being the potter and me being the clay. At the time, I just liked the song. I didn’t understand until I reached my adult years that he was molding and shaping me. He was using the fires of my hurt to set the masterpiece he was creating. As each piece was finished he would have to fire it just as a craftsman fires their ceramics. Although beautiful, the finished piece is fragile. If dropped or mishandled, it will break.

Well, that’s what kept happening to me. As God molded me and fired me, I would get broken. But, God doesn’t throw away our broken pieces, no...he picks them up and uses them again to make a more beautiful and wonderful masterpiece than the first. With each new molding, I would be refined by a trouble in life, a test to walk through. Most of the times, the fires of the situation would be so hot that I would scream out to God for relief. He didn’t take me out of the fires, no...he helped me through them.

I think I’m a lot closer to that magnificant masterpiece than I was when I was little. I don’t think God is yet finished with me, but his molding of me has left me with a wonderful testimony to the kind of God he really is. He is definately a loving and wonderful God who cares deeply for his children.

If I tried to write this story from a physical point of view, it would not be a wonderful story. Because the physical events that happened were ugly, and awful. But when that same story is viewed from the spiritual stand point, it is magnificant. It goes from being ugly and awful to being beautiful and something to be proud of. Our bodies contain our spirit that is meant to be God’s masterpiece. And that masterpiece contains the testimony of the spirit.

This story is the testimony of my spirit, not of my body. For flesh speaks to flesh and spirt speaks to spirit. It is during our most trying times that the spirit within us speaks to the spirit that made us. I’m not some amazing person who can carry around the weight of the world. But the God that created this masterpiece out of so many accidents and broken pieces is a God that I would never want to live life without.