The Treasure in Earthen Vessels

Two weeks ago, I was asked by a friend at church if I would like to write something and share it at an upcoming worship night. The theme for the evening was communion in suffering.

I put some things together that God has been teaching me lately, and sent it off to the organizer. It was of a more reflectional, cognitive nature: About how my frequent response to suffering (“I don’t deserve this!”) reveals my heart idolatry. How Jesus is the only human who never deserved to suffer anything, and yet He suffered everything for the glory before Him and for us. How suffering can lead us to worship and to reveal God’s glory in our weakness.

The organizer came back to me asking if I could have some sort of illustration to follow through the piece from beginning to end….something a bit more on the creative side.

So I gave it some thought….and the next day I was reminded of something a friend had told me about the week before: Kintsugi. A Japanese art form in which broken pottery is repaired with golden seams. Some late-night research/online orders, a shopping trip, a couple practice runs, and a few days later, the worship night arrived and I attempted to demonstrate what I had learned. Attempted being the key word—unsurprisingly it didn’t work out quite as well as I had hoped!

But the flaws in my presentation don’t change the object lesson….so here it is!

For those of you who were at the worship night last year, you might remember Adria’s video about the process of making pottery items. Scripture compares us to clay in the hands of God, the Potter.

When I was a child, I loved making numerous small pots out of mud. I would wait for them to dry and then play with them. But if left outside in a rainstorm, my collection would turn right back into mud.

God uses the furnace of refinement in our lives to make us stronger. But oftentimes that’s not the end of the story.

These are bowls that have gone through some kind of refining process. They are strong and useful. They have their own style and beauty.

But in most of our lives, at some point suffering will come along. There are innumerable examples of suffering in our lives. This may be a health crisis or a long illness. It may be betrayal by a friend. It could be the death of a loved one.

{After saying each of those things, I gave a small black bowl a smash with the hammer. As I had suspected ahead of time, my nerves meant that I really took it out on the poor little thing!} 

Sometimes, that suffering breaks our hearts, seemingly destroying any possibility of future usefulness in our lives. But when we feel broken beyond repair, God never discards us. He sees us. He holds us.

In traditional Kintsugi, the pottery had been broken by accident. {In fact, from my reading, people who purposely broke pottery in order to use it in Kintsugi were criticized!!} But we know that with our God, there are no accidents. And He has a promise for us, in Romans 8:28:

“We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

Even the things that seem to be the end of the world are for our good. And so God sets about to redeem the brokenness in our lives.

God promised Israel, “So I will restore to you the years that the locust has eaten…My great army which I sent among you” (Joel 2:25).

God said, “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; you are Mine” (Isaiah 43:1).

Now this process doesn’t happen immediately!! It takes great patience. I had to hold the piece in place and WAIT for the glue to set. And even when I set one section aside, it’s not because I’m rejecting it! It’s because it needs more time to strengthen that bond before I add the next piece.

The bowl from Friday, in the reconstruction process.

Just because God repairs us doesn’t mean that we go back to exactly how we were before! Wounds leave scars. But as God puts us back together, His redemption shows through in our lives. God uses the suffering that came to reveal the excellence of HIS glory in our weakness. 

2 Corinthians 4 talks about the idea of how we should not lose heart in times of hardship, because God is at work! This is summed up in verses 6 and 7:

“For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

God is the power. HE is the treasure that we carry in earthen vessels. And through the suffering which He allows into our lives, HIS glory can shine forth brightly.

My first two practice attempts are in the back – the small one in front is #3 and it definitely turned out the best so far!

So that is what I shared!

During the demonstration, though, I failed to even glue two pieces together—because of the overly-smashed condition and my nerves, I didn’t even pick two matching pieces! :O Because of that, during the rest of the evening the epoxy hardened on the two pieces I had tried to match up. Thankfully I realized they weren’t really a match, so they weren’t connected—but they still had dried epoxy where a new seam would have to go. So after getting home I set to work cutting off the epoxy.

It made me think about how sometimes (often times), God has to carve away parts of us that are unhealthy or sinful. It’s never ever a fun process, and usually not a quick one either! And even when I think the job is done, usually some more crud shows back up later and the pruning process must continue, as was the case in cleaning these two pieces from my mistake.

Of course, in both the demonstration and in real life, it’s the human causing trouble! My impatience means that unlike these inanimate pieces of pottery, I squirm and wiggle as God works to put my broken heart back together. As the hands on the illustration side, it is I who am impatient in waiting for the glue to set, sometimes preventing pieces from joining well together. The one in the video was quick & easy and set well, but the next pieces I put together this morning took three attempts, two failures and the cleaning off of the still-wet glue which followed.

It was tempting to say, “this one is too badly broken – it can’t be redeemed.” But God never does that with us, and so I persevered. And eventually, the two large pieces were successfully joined with gold {the literal meaning of “kintsugi”!}

But after they were well set I was looking at which piece to do next. And I realized that the bottom piece no longer wants to fit perfectly where it was before. Either the epoxy spread the two bottom pieces to be wider than originally, or somewhere else the angle is just slightly wrong…. So out came the knife again, this time scraping away at the pottery itself.

Now the fit is better, and so tomorrow or the next day this piece will be glued in and the process will continue. And just as our loving heavenly Father never gives up on redeeming our beauty into ashes, so I won’t give up on this little bowl.

11/26 Update: A couple days ago I finished the bowl! Here are final shots of the repaired bowl I had broken at the worship night.