Once in a museum I saw a centuries-old example of the Japanese art of kintsugi – “golden joinery.” In kintsugi, broken pottery is repaired with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, so that the fissures are not merely repaired but made beautiful, as precious metal is visible only where there was brokenness.
The memory of my father, who has died, is both a broken and a golden piece of me, and so is the knowledge that my mother will one day die.
None of this is unfair; it makes our time and our love all the more precious. The day will come when I’m a vein of gold in my own son’s memory.
God finds our brokenness and repairs it. God never promised to keep us from breaking but did offer God’s unbroken word that everything we need is right at hand.
This message is excerpted from “Repairing what is broken” by Karen Craigo in the November 2016 Gather magazine.
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