Hello again friends! I came across a couple treasure finds that triggered some memories for me, and I thoughts I would share them with you. The Lord put this on my heart in the several days and so it seems like I need to sharing them. I hope you find these thoughts as helpful to you as they were to me.
As I picked out my coffee cup a couple of days ago, I have many, many of them,I thought about a particularly special cup that was given to me by my youngest son. I had just gone through a second around of Mohs surgery for skin cancer on my nose. It was a tough time. But his gift to me was a very meaningful gift. It was a broken then repaired cup that was the most beautiful cup that I had seen in a very long time. It is a Japanese tradition of broken pieces being repaired, not to its’ original beauty, but something much more beautiful! It is put back together with gold on the broken pieces. It is a process called Kintsugi. So you don’t see the cracks anymore, but instead you see the gold which covers the brokenness with gold. You can look it up and read more about it.
So this is how our lives can be sometimes. Why we expect that we won’t have trials and troubles, I don’t know. We are told in the Bible that it will come to visit us. We see our heart break at the things we are experiencing every day and wonder how we can put it all back together. But God reminded me that it isn’t my job to worry about it because God has a plan to put it all back together and make it even more beautiful than it was before it became broken. My face looked really bad and it isn’t a thing to show so I won’t. But I can tell you that I really had to lean on God to heal my cancer, to give me a great cosmetic surgeon who did great work making my nose look somewhat the same as it did before. Just as the broken pieces of my face represented my broken heart during the cancer and what was required to rid myself of the cancer, God brought it all back together because He was in control in the first place. He used people to discover it and a surgeons that made it look almost like nothing has happened.
So it is with life. We have to turn it all over. We need to trust Him with it all. A broken piece, like us, can be made even more beautiful when we allow God to put it back together. I hope the image above gives you a beautiful example to you today for whatever you may be going through.
The second thing that happened was to find a beautiful statue of two eagles in flight. The story goes clear back to 2000 when I worked at Joyce Meyer Ministries and she shared a teaching on eagles and their habits and life. When eagles find their mate, it is for life. The male eagle finds the female eagle that he chooses and he will chase after her. She makes him work for it! They will play like acrobats in the air. He will chase her around and up and down all over the sky. He pursues her. If she finds that the male eagle is to her liking, she will then turn upside down with her wings spread out and go into a free-fall upside down. The male eagle must extend his talons to her extended talons and he must catch her before she will fall to the ground. She must fully trust this male eagle and trust him to catch her. As he catches her, this is her mate for life, as he is her mate for life. There are so many areas about the eagles that are fascinating regarding their life and how it can easily apply to us and our trust in God. I have this statue now and sharing it with you in hopes that you can see the correlation. We too have to decide whether we will totally trust God with ALL of our areas of our lives. He wants us to let go and let Him catch us and carry us through our early lives and into a life of eternity in heaven with Him. You may be experiencing the chase as He pursues you. Are you running away from Him, or are you opening your arms to Him and what He has for you? I want to be like the female eagle and hold my hands out for Him to take a hold of me and never let go and help me live the best life I can for Him.
We have many distractions that keep us from thinking clearly or taking a few minutes to ponder this. But I hope with this post, it will give you a couple moments to apply these thoughts to your life today. Let the pieces be put back together by the One who can make the broken pieces beautiful. Be like the female eagle and let go of the hard times and give it up to Him, the One who knows how to work it all out. This is as much for me today as it may be for you. I hope you find it helpful and encouraging.
Until next time…
JoAnn Shiley 