A few weeks ago, my husband and I went to John’s Pass for the afternoon. It’s a fishing village with a boardwalk and tons of shops and restaurants.
We went into a little dog boutique and I found this adorable mug. I painstakingly selected the most perfect mug without any nicks or cracks on it and couldn’t wait to have my coffee in it the next morning.
But, life had other plans.
Mere minutes after getting home, I began scratching the pesky little price tag off of the bottom of the mug. Somehow, the mug managed to slip out of my hands and went crashing onto the hard tile floor. The handle smashed into what seemed like a million little pieces. I could barely bring myself to look at the aftermath.
Sure, it was just a coffee mug, but it was a brand new coffee mug, one that I had so carefully picked out just hours earlier. It was a cute and fun little thing that brought me so much joy to look at.
But now, it was shattered and broken.
My husband, always the optimist, decided to try to fix it with some super glue. He carefully picked up the pieces of the mug, figured out how they all fit together, and glued them all back together.
After allowing the glue to sit for several hours, the mug was as good as new again. Well, sort of…
The pieces were all put back together, but there are nicks and cracks all along the handle now.
This mug reminds me of us, of life. How we can so painstakingly plan things out and carefully align ourselves with a picture-perfect future, but then, here comes life with other plans. So completely and utterly random and unpredictable at times, but as they say, shit happens.
And yes, it does. Shit does happen.
Like the mug, we slip out of our own hands and onto the hard tile floor where we shatter into what seems like a million little pieces.
But like the mug, we also rebuild.
We put ourselves back together again. The only difference is that we don’t use glue. We use love and joy and hope and strength to fill our cracks.
We are our own glue. It comes from within us. We hold ourselves together, even when the cracks are growing and spreading and it would be much easier to allow ourselves to break.
And while we may never be completely whole again, there is beauty in our brokenness.
There is beauty in the nicks and cracks, for they make us uniquely us.
There is beauty in our mended, shattered hearts, for it is within those hearts that we hold the stories of our lives. The stories that got us here, to this exact moment, when we are learning how to put ourselves back together again.
We may break, but we will always rebuild.
We are nothing if not resilient.
Just like this mug, our nicks and cracks make us uniquely us.
