Have you ever been in a church with stained glass windows on a sunny day? They are so beautiful. I love seeing them in churches especially when the glass tells a story. They will often have pictures of the disciples or the heroes of the faith in their time of need. When the light shines through, the room lights up with all the beautiful colors and you see the detail in the art. It’s amazing. I’ve had the privilege of seeing some of the most beautiful stained glass windows in Europe including Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey.
I’ve never made a stained glass window, but I’ve looked up the process. It takes a lot of time and preparation. Once you have the design of whys you want your art to look like, you then have to determine what colors and shapes it will take to make it the most beautiful. That’s when the process really begins. You then take glass, score it and break each piece. Until it is broken, it cannot become as beautiful as it can be. It’s in the brokenness that it can be put together with the other pieces to create the masterpiece that is planned.
Once the broken pieces broken, it’s then arranged on a marble slab. The pieces are then soldered together with foil. The soldering process is time consuming. It requires that the pieces of glass undergo intense heat and pressure. It may also require more breaking so that the pieces fit together better. It can be a while before you really start to see the progress of what’s happening and it’s not until it is held up and the light shines through it that it’s beauty is revealed.
Our lives are a lot like stained glass windows. God has a beautiful design and plan for each one of us. He sees all the individual pieces that make up our lives, and He knows that it’s not until we are broken in the right places that He can make something beautiful of our lives. We look at the broken pieces and see a mess. We feel the pains of being broken. He looks at them and sees His art. He sees how each broken piece of our life will fit together to create the story of our life.
It takes time, pressure and intense heat to put all of our broken pieces together. We try to crawl off the slab because the process is more than we can bear at times, but if we trust Him, He will be faithful to complete the good work He began in us. Once the process is complete, it’s not until we let His light shine through us that our true beauty is shown. It’s when we let others see the story of how God took a broken life and made something beautiful of it that other begin to appreciate what He’s doing in their life. God takes our brokenness and creates masterpieces. What story does your life tell?
