Beauty in the broken

Last night, during family time, we were watching a ‘Nadiya Bakes’ on Netflix. During each episode she highlights a culinary artist. In this particular episode, Nadiya highlight a baker who made beautiful, hand decorated, exceedingly tall, sculpted cakes. As we watched this woman work we saw her sculpting and adding layers, hand painting, adding gold leaf, stenciling and layering, the cake truly became a work of art. It was fine art. Hand sculpted and beautiful.

As the work came to an end, the camera pulled out so that the viewer could see the whole cake. The camera person chose to start the pull back from crack in the cake. You can see where there is a split in the four foot tall cake. You can see the cake cracked open— breaking through…and it was beautiful!

When I ice a cake, I spend a great amount of time and icing to make sure that there is THICK layer to make sure that no cake shows through. If there were a crack or a sag in the cake, I would fixate on that spot to no end. I want it to be ‘perfect’. Nothing wrong, nothing showing. Covering all the imperfections is a must in my world.

But when I looked at that cake on the TV last night, the cracks simply added to the beauty.

And so it is God’s most precious creations…us. God sculpted us together in beautiful complex layers. God has added lay after layer to our being, hand painted our story with care and love, added touches of gold leaf here and there, stenciled on layers of life experience, and yes, we have some broken places but they add to our beauty. We are each God’s great work of art and God does not want to simply cover up our broken places. God works with those broken places, knits them into our stories, works around them so that they simply add to our beauty.

We all have places where we broken. We each have our own scars, if they are visible or not. But in our brokenness there is beauty. Our broken spots are places where we have grown or been challenges. They are spots where we persevered and grew stronger, but did not fall apart. Our cracks may be the emotional places that we suffer still and continue to need to work through, but each and every broken spot is a of us. And each of us are wonderful, beautifully made and sculpted to reflect the glory of God, even in our broken places.

I hope today that you find a find a little beauty in a broken spot.