“The Japanese have an artistic and spiritual practice called kintsugi. Kintsugi means “to mend with gold” (kin means “gold,” and tsugi means “to mend”). A kintsugi master would behold the fragments of a broken bowl for a long time before mending it, rejoining broken pieces of pottery using lacquer and gold. They have a philosophy or spirituality that embraces the broken or flawed as something that is beautiful in its own way. “The brokenness is part of the object’s story but not the end of that story. Kintsugi transforms a normal piece of pottery into a functional work of art. In many ways, Jesus does the same for us. He takes our brokenness and makes it beautiful.” –
The Weary Leader’s Guide to Burnout: A Journey from Exhaustion to Wholeness by Sean Nemecek
This is a beautiful metaphor for what God does in our lives. He takes our pain and brokenness and repairs it by the Holy Spirit in such a way that we are actually better than we would have been otherwise.
The crazy thing is is that the pottery is actually has more value after it has been repaired.