“I’m not that girl in College anymore! I was once fiery and public about Jesus. I wanted to change the world for Christ” I was grieving over the person I thought I had loss. Many days I have mourned, carrying guilt like stones on my shoulder.

My friend’s response, shocked me: “Be damned with who you were. We all are a work in progress.” As if being awaken to the reality, how strong the past have taken a hold of me. Still stuck in my own thinking, I said, “But I have a lot of scars now,” questioning if God still loves me. In the Christian purity culture, the messages I have heard are :

• God only blesses those the ‘wait for marriage’

• Those who fall into this “grievious sin” are second-class Christians.

• “Good girls don’t”

Though not specific, those are the messages we internalize. There was no space to uncover ‘some sins’. And the church’s silence, allowing culture to fill the void, has led many to hiding—even further stuck in the bondage to sin, shame, and suffering. What ended up happening is believers leaving the church from feeling ‘abandoned’ or ‘judged’ by the church they expect to love and care for them. So when I broke, I left the ‘religion’ where I felt I am expected to be ‘goody two shoes’ all the time.

I am a broken vessel that needs to be mended

It took many hard conversations over meals with friends and mentors for me to process my brokeness and slowly find healing . “That was all you knew. You were only trying to survive,” One older woman mentor comforted. “It’s just it’s an unsustainable solution and God is pulling you out of it because He wants to give you a better solution, Himself.

She is a founder of a social enterprise, working with women in the process of recovery to get out of the cycle addiction cycle. Where I was in, I relate much with those women in addiction. The tagline of the company, “From pieces, made whole.” She furthered shared me about this Japanese art of ‘Kinstugi’.

Kinstugi is the practice of mending broken pottery with gold-dusted lacquer, which results in a beautiful piece of pottery. Makoto Fujimura, an artist, relates the art of mending to our faith journeys. The world, he says, pursues perfection. We want to make things look as if they’d never been broken. But these Japanese aesthetics values the fractures that remain— and remake these potteries to be even more beautiful with those gold platings.

More beautiful, once having been broken

The broken jar is actually more beautiful now, having been restored. When Paul referred that we are “treasures in jars of clays” (2 Cor 4). Back in the day, they didn’t have a safe nor banks, so in a home, the most beautiful treasures were put in these jars. The jars needed to be broken, so that the ‘gold’ inside could be taken out. Same with our story..the treasure of who He wants to make us to be, can be let out when we let Christ work on our brokeness. Fujimara wrote, “Even Christ’s wounds are still with him in post-resurrection glory, and , therefore, we can assume that all we go through—even the fractures we go through—remain in some way to glorify.”

Galatians described where our guilt comes from:

“What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man.”

But this is the truth spoken by Paul:

“Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal & free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule—keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.” - Gal 2: 19-21

Mending is a slow process. Come to Him and be mended.

Some of us doesn’t want to get healed because healing hurts. You don’t want to get into that cast. But if you ask someone who have been healed from a broken leg, a 1000% they would say it was worth the hurt.

Until you can walk again. You can run again. You can jump again.

Because of the curse of sin, ALL of us are cracked vessels in need of the Father’s skillful mending. So, bring up your broken pieces—heart, mind, body and soul—to the Master Potter and allow him to put you back in a way that displays His glorious craftmanship, my dear.

—-

This was what I wrote, inspired by the book & movie, Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers, a retelling of the story of Gomer and Hosea in modern day context,

Men have always been selfish.
And life wasn't the fairest to her.
She saw through her rose-tinted glasses that she had to paint on her own.

Filling her own jar with make up flowers of her own imagination
So that her dull world becomes a little bit more colorful.
That way, she could bear her reality.
What must have it felt like. To live with demons on her mind.

If only.
Yes. if only.
She knew she has been drinking from the wrong well.
That there is Something better out there.
If only she would be brave to close the door of the past, leave her "drug of choice" , and trust the Living water to quench her thirst.

But oh, who would pursue her?
Who would--with her broken glasses that have been used as swords for protection.
High is her walls; sharp is her tongue.
Yet inside, you can see---the desire to be vulnerable.

Men were so ready to throw the first stone.
To shame. To put her in her place.
And one came to say, "Who amongst you have not sin, can throw the first stone."
The look in his eyes, so tender, telling her , "Who is there to condemn? Where are your accusers, my dear?"
He was telling her not to wear the weighty clothe of guilt anymore.
But to walk with her head held high, as like the lame of Bethesda at once when Jesus commanded him
to pick up his mat.

His name is Jesus.
The one who paid her out of that place of condemnation and shame.

But she was afraid. It seemed too good to be true.
She didn’t feel worthy to receive forgiveness. And she lingered in her darkness.

How gentle He must be.
Truly. How gentle, to aid upon her wounds.
To teach her patiently what love is again.
Telling her, "We have all the time to heal, my dear."

Now I take you as my Bride. my wife. You are Tirzah, my beloved.
Now you are mine; and I am yours.

Journal entry, August 12, 2022

An hour of conversation has passed since my friend and I chatted in the park. I was admiring the beauty of the greens, and she looked at me and said, “Tam, you are still that girl in college. I still see that desire to shine for Jesus. Yes, you are broken. That only makes you more beautiful now than you were before.”

There is no more condemnation, my dear. And believe that He withholds no good thing for those who love him.

Shame off you,

T.W.