Beauty from Brokenness

One Sunday morning a couple of years ago, I preached a sermon on Psalm 147:3:

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."

The theme for the morning was how God puts the broken pieces of our lives back together again -- and the new creation is even more beautiful than the first!

To illustrate, as I spoke of "brokenness" I took a hammer and smashed several ceramic floor tiles into pieces.

We are broken by disappointment -- wham!
We are broken by grief -- wham!
We are broken by rejection -- wham!
We are broken by suffering -- wham! wham! wham!

Then, I took the shattered fragments, and handed them to Joan Jacobowski, who had come onto the platform behind me.

Joan is an outstanding artist -- and while I finished preaching about the beauty God brings from brokenness, she began to create a mosaic.

In the hands of a master, the broken pieces became a beautiful work of art!

Since we have three Sunday morning worship services, Joan created three mosaics. At then end of each service, she showed us what she had accomplished -- and we cheered with tears.

The three mosaics now hang behind our new welcome center. The public is invited to stop in anytime to view them.

The center mosaic shows the cross, with the powerful, healing love of Christ bursting forth!

The side mosaics represent the world, and if you look, you will see Christ's love embracing it.

It reminds me of the old Gaither song:

Something beautiful,
Something good,
All my confusion, He understood.
All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife,
But He made something beautiful of my life.

. . . to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair." Isaiah 61:3