“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
“What?”
Kintsugi, is the Japanese art of repairing a broken piece of pottery using gold, platinum or silver mixed with lacquer. I found it on the WWW.
Rather than throw something away that is a treasured and precious possession; something that has a history and is valued, the Japanese, if they have the money and status, make a virtue out of a disaster. They have the broken pottery repaired. The result is the pottery has a marble like look with lines of gold or silver running through the design and making it functional again as an object but also valuable.
It struck me that this is what Jesus does with our lives here on earth. For those of us still in the process of being healed, whilst we wait our final redemption and our new bodies made whole, maybe only in heaven. He picks up our broken and worn beings and puts us together again, because each one of us is treasured as we submit to him. He does not erase our past but rather sanctifies it as we put it into his hands; lay it at his feet.
Of course we are made totally new in our spirits with the advent of the Holy Spirit coming into our lives, but for most of us, for the time-being, we are undergoing a process of then and now. We are being made new having been transformed by life in Jesus.
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1Corinthians 13:12 ESV)
If you will, Jesus is the gold that holds our new lives together in him and makes a virtue of our broken lives, not to be discarded on earth, but rather to be treasured and valued, held in honour because He first loved us which becomes a part of who we now are.
So today let us become vessels again for Jesus, as He hold us together and, from the outside, let others see Him in the cracks until we become owners of a new body made new!
Prayer: Father, it is a mystery how we are being transformed and yet we are still here on earth carrying on carrying on, seeing only dimly. As Your vessels please fill us with Your Light, Joy, Peace, Hope and intersessions as we ask You to hold us together again today and become useful once for the Kingdom in Your hands, in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Roderick Marshall