Kintsugi is a Japanese tradition of repairing broken pottery with gold. Rather than throwing away the broken pieces because they now seem damaged or beyond repair, a skilled craftsman painstakingly glues the pieces back together and highlights each crack with gold paint. Their belief is that the piece is now made more beautiful because of its brokenness.
This is the message we want our Wings participants to hear, believe and embody. There are some constant refrains that I hear from each of them: that they feel dirty, that they are damaged goods, and that they struggle with what their lives used to look like before coming to Wings. The message of kintsugi is a message of hope, and it’s a physical representation of what the gospel longs for us to know:
There is nothing that you could do to make God love you any more or any less than He loves you right now.
As a group, we smashed our individual pieces of pottery as we reflected on our fragility and named what we believed to be most broken about us. As we glued our pieces back together, we reflected on the truth that even though we have been broken, we have not been crushed beyond repair, abandoned, or destroyed. As we painted gold on our cracked lines, we recalled that Christ is the light of life, and that light is within each of us. He invites us to let His light shine through our brokenness and not hide it. We dreamed about how God might use our stories of brokenness to one day bring healing to others.
May all of our broken pieces be brought to Jesus so that He can make us whole again.
(Written by a Wings of Refuge Staff Member)
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