Kintsugi

Melissa Logsdon – September 12, 2023 3 Comments

I appreciate Melissa’s metaphor of God as artist- shaping and mending us into creations of value. May her vision of our brokenness being transformed into beauty encourage us to present all the pieces of ourselves to God’s hand to be made whole. -Renée 

When you break a piece of dishware, what do you do? Do you sweep it up, throw it away, and replace it? Or do you gingerly collect every piece, get out your super glue, and try to painstaking repair it to like-new condition– hoping no one will notice?

Or do you get out some gold paint, apply it to the broken places, accentuating the damage? Not likely, unless you practice Kintsugi. 

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of taking broken pottery and putting it back together with gold. Rather than hiding the flaws, this repair process highlights the broken places. By adding gold, the piece is not only restored to usefulness, but the broken places become the strongest points AND the piece is infused with GREATER VALUE!

Through this process, the artist does not try to conceal the broken places, but rather esteems and beautifies the cracks. For there is glory in the piece because of it. The whole is all the more valuable as a result!

While this illustration may not be a perfect representation, I feel that it does a pretty good job of showing us God’s heart. God longs to take our broken pieces and mend them together and support them and show us our great value and worth (maybe not according to the world) in God’s eyes. We can experience and extend love even when feeling/looking broken. And our broken places may seem even more beautiful, more sacred, more holy as a result. 

From this perspective, we can be encouraged that our lives don’t need to be perfect in order to be of worth and value. But rather, when we hand over all of our pain and brokenness, God can and does use all of it to make something beautiful of our lives.

This allows us to declare, along with the psalmist:

We’ve passed through fire and flood, yet in the end you, God, always bring us out better than we were before, saturated with your goodness… I will forever praise this God who didn’t close His heart when I prayed and never said no when I asked for help. God never once refused to show me tender love. Psalm 66:12b, 20 (TPT)

Melissa Logsdon
September 12, 2023