Our kitchen cabinets are filled with partial dishware sets. Where there once were sets of eight, I count only seven dinner plates, five drinking glasses, six soup bowls, and seven saucers.

Why? Because we are human and have kids in our home. Bowls have been dropped on their way to the sink, glasses sat down too hard and plates hit together roughly as the kids load in the dishwasher. I’m confident our family is not alone in this, and I’m confident your broken things find a home in the same place ours do…the garbage.

If you think about it, that’s where we send all of our broken things, don’t we? To the dumpster. Broken lamp? Trash. Broken stool? Toss it out. Broken life? Worthless. Broken friendship? Dump it. Broken marriage? Better ditch that too and start over. When did we get to the point that anything broken is automatic trash?

I’m fascinated with ancient cultures and practices. Most recently, the Japanese practice of Kintsugi has captured my attention. Kintsugi (literally translated golden joinery) is the art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer dusted or mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. Legend has it that in the fifteenth century a Japanese shogun broke his favorite Chinese bowl and sent it China to be repaired. When it returned to him repaired with ugly staples, he commissioned Japanese craftsmen to find a more flattering method of repair. Thus, Kintsugi was born and the practice became part of Japanese culture. The Japanese embraced Kintsugi as a beautiful statement of restoring broken things and giving them new life.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you pull the broken cup out of the trash and start your own golden repairs (though I’m interested to see how it would turn out). I am asking you to stop and ponder this idea of restoration. How many of us have been broken at some time in our life? If we’re honest, all of us. And how many of us bought the enemy’s lie that we were worthless when we were broken? I’d venture to say more than care to admit it. You see, church pews are filled with broken people desperately trying to hide their bruises, cracks, and scars? Why? Fear of being tossed aside like my broken dishes. The psalmist relates to this when he says, “I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery” (Psalm 31:12).

But our God is a God of restoration. The ultimate Kintsugi artist. One of the many Hebrew names of God is Jehovah Rapha, the God who Heals. In Exodus 15:26, we find the Jehovah who heals His people of physical and spiritual ailments. Rather than tossing people aside because they are broken, he pulls them closer. He restores them. He makes them new again. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).

During his ministry, Jesus gravitated toward the broken and healed them physically and spiritually. A naked and crazed, demon possessed man who lived in a cemetery (Mark 5); a woman of multiple husbands who snuck to the well in the heat of midday to avoid the judgment of others (John 4); a short-in-stature and short-in-love tax collector (Luke 19); an adulterous woman caught the act (John 8); a sister mourning the death of her brother (John 11); a proud Jewish man on his way to Damascus (Acts 9); a crippled man unable to even crawl toward healing (John 5); a world full of lost people separated from God by sin (John 3:16-17). Let’s not forget you…and me. Jesus himself came from a bloodline of murderers, adulterers, and prostitutes. Talk about restoring a bloodline!

Just as the shimmery gold binds the broken pottery giving it beauty and giving it new worth, Christ binds our brokenness and redeems our lives with his crimson blood. His strength and his beauty shine through our cracks. When I stop being ashamed of my past, my failures, my hurts, and I start showing how a cross on Calvary has redeemed me, well, that’s where the beauty and power of Jesus is revealed. I think Paul said is best in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Isn’t time we embrace our hurts and scars? It’s through the healing of them that the world will see Jesus. Contact me if you need the help of a counselor to walk you closer to healing.

-Joel Walton