From Broken Glass to a New Mosaic

"You take wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish. No matter; you cast it into the kind, just Earth. She grows the wheat-the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds it in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest" (Thomas Carlyle).

What a grand thought! Another wonderful concept: God takes our broken glass and makes a new mosaic for us. There is a story of a town during World War II that was bombed and its lone church reduced to rubble. The survivors in the town decided to use the broken glass from the former beautiful mosaics and make a new design from the shattered pieces. They had to put together their own shattered lives, too. They put their griefs into God's bosom and prayed that their lives would be whole again. Oh, how it touches my heart to envision our compassionate Father holding our shattered minds and hearts to His own; absorbing the anguish at the foot of His cross, for this is where all sorrow finds its way.

These past months we have witnessed so much broken glass, what I call the potsherds of life. First there was the shocking news of the 17-year-old boy, the grandson of friends of ours, who died after what he thought was an innocent night of fun, including drugs and alcohol (oh, young people, take care - this dear young man was the light of so many lives, and now it is snuffed out for one night of carelessness!); then the email from my beloved daughter-in-law in California that her sister was dying of malignant melanoma (she was beautiful, only 45 years old - she leaves a husband who adored her, and two teenaged children); and in the past few days the death of the recently-retired president of our local university, only 66 years old, he went in for a routine operation for a routine disease, and was gone in a matter of days. He had just retired from the university a few months before to spend time with his family and community, a beautiful soul who gave and gave and gave. I am so heartbroken! Nothing, dear friends, NOTHING is routine, is it?

Live today as if it will be your last. I pray it won't be, but we do not know. Look at your family with new eyes and a renewed heart. Don't hesitate to tell them that you love them; that they are your mosaic, the jewels that make your life sparkle!