If you are anything like us, this has been a really tough week or two. Open up your computer and you are likely to read of loss, suffering, and persecution. Turn on television news and find more of the same. Facing devastating world news on top of the daily challenges of whichever place you have chosen to love, serve, live, and work feels quite heavy and terribly overwhelming.
When wave after wave of bad news comes, it is easy to forget the ways in which we have seen God work. It is easy to lose hope. I pulled an old post from my archives in hopes of encouraging one (maybe two?) of you today. -tara
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It was given to me when she passed away, carried all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to Port au Prince, Haiti.
The pieces of my grandmothers blue candy dish lay shattered on my bedroom floor. An important family heirloom ruined. Disappointed and upset about breaking this piece of family history that I had been lucky enough to inherit, I cried over the broken glass. How could I be so careless with something important to so many?
Cracked into so many jagged pieces, repair and restoration seemed unlikely if not impossible.
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A few days later it is Christmas morning and the door to my teenage daughter’s room is locked. “What are you doing? Please open up!” I say with my face smashed into the door. Shortly thereafter she appears, pride and triumph evident on her face. She walks toward me to gingerly place the dish, precariously pieced back together, into my hands. I gasp with surprise. It looks so much like it looked before it crashed to the floor.
She beams with joy.
Just as she sets the mainly restored lid of the dish back in its place on top, the entire thing crashes into pieces again in my hands, slicing my thumb open as it shatters. Pieces fall to the floor around our feet.
Knowing the time and painstaking effort she invested into the repair I look at her face, assuming it is now her turn to weep. She pauses, looks at the pieces both in my hands and on the floor below us. She takes a deep breath and in a matter of fact tone she says, “I’ll fix it again. This is repairable. You just watch.” She bends down to pick up what has fallen a second time and turns to walk away with it.
Cracked again into so many jagged pieces, repair and restoration seemed unlikely if not impossible.
Several days later, glue dried a second time, a few extra scars and missing pieces evident, she presents me with the dish once more.
I remember vividly the pain of crashing a second time. I was a divorced, single mom.
At twenty-two years old I was trying desperately to piece my life back together after the second shattering.
I said and thought things to myself.
“I cannot be fixed.”
“Once was enough.”
“Who will love you now?”
“This is too much. Give up.”
“You cannot be made whole.”
Cracked into so many jagged pieces, repair and restoration seemed unlikely if not impossible.
At the time I was carrying in my womb the unplanned little baby girl who would grow up to look me in the eye and say to me with confidence, “This is repairable, you just watch.”
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