Broken Glass - Guest Post by Joanna Politano

I've had the joy of getting to know Joanna over the past few years. She's an amazing writer with the sweetest heart and love for her family and God. When I asked her to participate this year with a post about Masterpiece, she quickly agreed, and I'm so glad she did. This post is absolutely beautiful. So without further introduction, here's Joanna!

BROKEN GLASS

This is what broken glass looks like:

But we all know this image, because we’ve felt this way before. Perhaps you experienced a day where incredible weight built up until you broke under the pressure. Maybe it took years of stress for you to shatter. Either way, we’ve all had a time where we’ve known without a doubt that we are utterly broken. Crushed.

Nothing makes you feel more useless or discouraged. After all, what do you do with shattered glass? It’s difficult and tedious to clean up. You don’t want to let someone else clean it up—what if they cut themselves? So you collect the pieces and get them as far out of reach as possible.

But what if someone asked you for those shards as you snuck them out to the trash? My mom saves everything—EVERYTHING—because she sees a potential craft project in it. So what if someone looks at those shards and says, “yeah. I think I can use those. Would you give them to me?”

“Ok, sure,” you say. “Here you go.” And you wait to see what they’ll do with it. Lo and behold, they polish them. Not only that, but they infuse them with color. Wow, that’s incredible! I’m glad I gave this to someone who knows what they’re doing. Now someone has a collection of beautiful stones for their mantle, all because they were placed in the hands of a master craftsman. What was broken is now polished out into something useful and pretty.

But this artist has more in mind than merely pretty stones. “Just wait” he says. So you leave him to his work, finally beginning to trust his expertise. He has a very detailed plan on paper, with specific ideas for every single piece of glass. Ready to be amazed, you step up to look at his work when he pronounces it done. And of course he does not disappoint as he reveals…

You stand back in awe, tears in your eyes, as you see what the master craftsman has done with the shattered pieces of glass. The brokenness you wanted to hide away and move on from as quickly as possible. “I can use that,” he’d said, and now those words ring true. Here it is, all your pain and brokenness in a beautiful display, in a way that makes sense. The pieces fit together, in this master’s plan, to form an entire picture. They even tell a story to others looking on and communicate something to them. Amazing, you think. And truly it is. But he’s not *quite* done. “Just one more important touch,” he says, disappearing for a moment. And then light bursts through the glass from the other side, a prism of colors raining down on you.

And then you get a glimpse of his true plans from the beginning. For only a master craftsman can take your shattered, broken pieces, fit them together into the beautiful image He’d designed from the beginning, and then shine His own light through the prism of colors for a radiant display that will leave everyone who sees it breathless with the wonder of His artwork.

And imagine, He’s done all that through you. Through your brokenness. Because only broken pieces can be fitted together into something beautiful, just as empty jars are the only ones ready to be filled with something amazing.

And only a master can take the dirty, messy garbage you would love to discard forever and make it a stunning masterpiece that will prove to everyone around how great are His plans and His power.

I don’t know about you, but when I’ve been broken in the past, it feels like an “end.” The end of my strength, the end of a relationship, the end of my success. But in truth it’s a brilliant beginning. God cannot work with a person who feels “whole” on his or her own. It’s in our brokenness that we become useable, and it’s that brokenness that He uses to reach people, to create that larger picture we can’t see, and to make a glorious piece of art that fully reflects who He is as an artist. Personally, I can’t do much with broken glass besides line my trash can with it, but hand it over to an artist and our shame, embarrassment, and heartache becomes a masterpiece.

Meet Joanna (and her adorable family)!

I’m a work-from-home mom of one super cute baby girl, and I write novels. I married my hero Vince, who is my love and my polar opposite. I write, he tears it up with the red pen. I break cars and other mechanical things, he puts them back together. He’s nailed the “speak the truth” thing, and I bring the “in love” part. But the real spark to our marriage is that he does not like chocolate and I…  like it a normal amount. We love and live from our little house in the woods near Lake Michigan, which is undergoing a constant renovation.