From Broken to Beautiful

I carry outside the perfect, smooth pieces of tile–solid blues and green speckled and flower print–and with a hammer, shatter them. Dust flies. I breathe it in, and it makes my eyes water. Careful not to touch the sharp edges, I put the ruined bits back in my bag.

Inside wait two pots and a pair of eight-year-old hands.

We spread the grout-that-binds over the surface of the terra cotta pot, then we select broken tile pieces and press them into the grout. There's no rhyme or reason to it. This one looks pretty, we think. Or maybe this blue will look nice by the orange and blue flower. Or the plain white gives a nice contrast to the pattern in this section.

But really, who knows how we select each piece?

They look different from each other, my niece's pattern and mine. But they're both beautiful.

We finish arranging the tiles and let them dry. Later, I'll smooth grout between the cracks to connect the patterns.

As a final step, when the pots are complete, I fill them with rich, organic soil and two plants–one with pink flowers and one that will hopefully someday bloom white. What was once a plain pot and what were once broken pieces of tile now become a place of life.

In this process, I realize I'm telling a piece of God's story. I don't mean to imply that God purposefully breaks things, that the Fall was part of his plan or that he enjoys our suffering. I mean that God takes this brokenness and transforms it into something beautiful.

He makes it a place of life.

In the beginning was the Garden, the home for humanity. It's edged by two rivers and houses the tree of life. But humanity took a hammer and shattered the harmony and beauty. God picks up these pieces, he fits them into a pattern–one only he can envision–and binds them together.

And here's what amazes me: the end of the story, the final scene, he sets in a place even more beautiful then the beginning. He combines the energy of the city and the peacefulness of the garden in perfect combination. It's fed by the river and trees of healing.

It overflows with beauty, community and life.

God can do that. He can take what I've ruined and transform it into something beautiful.

That's what my art taught me this week.

What has your art taught you?

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Heather Goodman secretly wishes to be a Broadway star. She enjoys tea every afternoon, tortures herself with Pilates, and has a penchant for breaking out into song and dance. You can sign up for her free ezine, Glimpses: Christianity in Art and Life, on her website at L'Chaim.