Rough patches of dried super glue stuck on my fingers. It wears away slowly and picking at it doesn’t do that much good.
It’s super glue, you know.
It adheres quickly to pieces, patches, fragments, or fingers.
The super glue squeezes out of the applicator in a small stream along the jagged edge of the broken plate piece. With a bit of lining up and applying some pressure, it fuses itself together against the matching edge of the other piece of plate.
Broken, yet whole again. And no matter how closely it fits back together and how expert the hand wielding the super glue bottle, if I look closely enough I can see the faint line where the broken pieces are re-aligned.
Neither can I undo it, once I apply the glue. If I want to separate the two pieces again, I can not separate them in the exact same place. I can’t pull them apart. If I want my plate in pieces again, I’m going to have to break it again. And it’s going to break in different places.
I heard this illustration applied to marriage.
Marriage adheres us. Man and women. Husband and wife. And when we try to separate what God has joined together, well we break it.
Breaking something is never done smoothly. There are splinters sometimes. Fragments. Big pieces or millions of small bits. There is damage. Always.
The sound of something shattering is a sound all of its own and it startles and alarms.
Sometimes we sweep up the tiny pieces strewn everywhere and deem it unsalvageable. Yet, if we wanted to take the time and effort and challenge and effort and work and effort, we could painstakingly mend it. With effort.
Sometimes we pick up the two broken halves and we toss them carelessly in the trash can. Ah well, I really didn’t like the plate too much anyway. It wasn’t all that pretty anymore. It was faded. Really, rather ugly anymore. No use wasting my time, or the glue, to fit the pieces back together.
You know, when the broken pieces look like too many or too faded, pick them up carefully. Put them in a box.
Bring them.
Set them at His feet. Our God.
He doesn’t see a box of broken pieces.
He sees a treasure chest.
He reaches in and He starts mending. Piece by broken piece.
He won’t run out of glue. His fingers won’t get stuck together. He won’t get confused.
Bring the pieces. Bring yourself. Lay them down.
It won’t be easy. Splinters hurt. Glue is sticky.
Let Him work.
Let Him work.
God is able to do the thing we call impossible.
And He doesn’t even need super glue to do it.
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Thanks for your eloquent words! We are neighbors at 5 min Friday today. I love the idea of bringing my broken pieces to God. Such encouraging words!
This is a beautiful picture of God mending our brokenness. I’ve broken two plates this year. (Well, one was broken in a suitcase, and the other by my 5-year-old girl.) I still have the first plate in a bag, hoping to find the last missing piece somewhere so I can glue it all together because it was special to me. However, when my daughter broke our souvenir plate into more shards than I could count, all those fragments got swept up and thrown away. It didn’t seem worth my effort, honestly.
So I totally get your illustration. Sometimes, we feel like our brokenness is beyond repair and not worth anyone’s time, but that’s not how God sees us. He will bind us up, sometimes even reshaping us into something more useful and more beautiful. We are special to Him and certainly worth HIS effort.
Thank you again for these thoughts and truths to ponder.
This. This is. Amazing. Awesome. Should be trending on every social media out there. God is the only true healer of broken hearts and lives!
Love the eloquence and feeling of this. Like clay jars we are so easily cracked and broken but we have a loving Father who tenderly picks us up and puts us back together when we yield to His touch. Thank you for sharing this with us.
What a wonderful picture of God mending broken lives.