Our preLenten retreat Return to Our Senses in Lent, is only a week away and Ash Wednesday is only a few days after that. Tom and I are heading off this morning for one of our quarterly prayer retreats. Not surprisingly, I am thinking a lot about the transformation I want to see in my own life during the season.
Part of what has struck me this morning is how easily we discard that which is no longer perfect or functional. Mending, repairing and reusing are lost arts. Yet there is beauty hidden in brokenness. God does not discard us because we are broken. Our remade selves are grounded in the transformation of our brokenness.
There is often more beauty in repaired or reused objects than in the original. Like in the Japanese art of Kintsugi in which the art of mending broken pottery with laquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold highlighting the brokenness. Repair can be beautiful. Repair can make things better than new.
We see it too in creative forms of recycling. Like this use of broken pots for planting.
Broken pots from Salvaged Nature http://www.etsy.com/shop/SalvagedNature
And this creative use of an old tire – ugly and polluting in the environment – to make a planter
Check out these creative ideas too for new garden containers – or for storage of other items too.
What I have been thinking about is – If we can make such beauty from old, discarded items imagine what God can do with the broken areas of our life. Nothing should be discarded, everything can be made new.