The Vase

Abigail and Dolley readers this will be a deeply personal post but I hope that you will be inspired by this story.  I hope that some of you will find this blog and read this story and recognize yourself in the words.

I feel like when God created me, he started out with a beautiful white vase.  On it, He wrote the story of my life.  Each experience, each triumph, each trial was the art that He drew on the vase of my life.  It was fired in the oven, glazed, and shone with glory.  When I was 29 years old, I rededicated my life to the Lord and the Living Water of the Holy Spirit filled me completely.  I prayed for a ministry and He put flowers in the vase.  Beautiful creations that were there for a time to drink of the love of the Living God.  These were my friends, my family, and my coworkers.  The water was sweet and abundant and I was so proud of how beautiful the vase looked with the bouquet of people God had picked to keep me company in this life.

As the years went by, my work began to take a toll.  The stresses of life were overwhelming and water began to leak out of the back of the vase.  From the front, which everyone could see, all was well but the water was leaking.  I stopped going to the faucet and getting filled up, the number of people in the vase was a heavy burden to carry and they started falling out of the back.  Every month, little chunks fell off the back of the vase, but nobody noticed.

I stopped wanting to be around others who were full of the Living Water, they reminded me of what was missing and I resented it.  I tried to fill the void with smoke, but it just evaporated.  I could no longer hold on to all the people in the vase as the water leaked out.  July 20th, 2010 I took a huge blow and the entire back of the vase blew out, shards and water flew everywhere.

I thought if I changed jobs that everything would be okay, I only looked at the front of the vase now.  I presented the front in all its beauty but the back was missing and I was leaking water everywhere.  The vase could no longer hold any flowers and the front began to show cracks.  My family saw a crack here and there, my husband saw others, my friends saw others still, but I am a master at makeup and I quickly covered the cracks and everyone just said, "Well, sometimes vases get cracked."  It's stress.

Over New Years weekend, the vase shattered.  Now, everyone could clearly see the cracks and they began to tell me what they had seen.  I insisted I was fine, no big deal, and I limped back into work, with only a little of the vase still in tact.  That was the part that was making a lot of money, but they knew the vase was gone, too.  When they asked me to leave the last remnant of the vase completely shattered.  I was shattered into a thousand pieces.

I've been wandering around my house for the last few weeks looking for the glue.  I have been wondering how in the world I am going to superglue this vase back together.

What I realized today was this, those broken pieces, the ones that broke off long ago are cemented in the table the vase has rested upon all these years. 

The table is made of concrete and the Lord has taken those broken pieces and has been embedding them.  If you look closely you can see each piece pressed into the mosaic.  Those last few pieces scattered about are the just new pieces in the project.  It's not yet done, the only thing that is certain is that it's not a vase.

I've put down my Super Glue.  I will never be a vase again, but I'll be a table which is infinitely more useful.