A Simple Prayer ~ Texture Tuesday

Dear God ~

Enlighten what's dark in me...

Strengthen what's weak in me...

Mend what's broken in me...

Bind what's bruised in me...

And lastly...

Revive whatever peace and love has died in me.

- Chonda Pierce

Across the Room ~ A Friday Find

Sitting in my favorite chair...watching some episodes of the Bible on Netflix...I looked up across the room.  On the piano sits a clay pot...not unlike what might have been carried to the well for water in Bible times.

This pot is faded, cracked, and has been broken in two and sealed back together. Still usable.  Ed and I had this pot at the front of the church at our wedding...representing our lives with our past mistakes, hurts, wounds, pain.  Our brokenness.  I noticed that the rose I had saved and dried from Ed's mother's gravesite when she died in April had been placed inside of one of the cracks.

And I found beauty in it all...

I rediscovered and was reminded that it is through the challenges, the interruptions, the hurts, the darkness, the losses that we are changed.  It is the stress and heat of these things that refine and conform us into God's desire for us.

Pain and loss...loneliness and despair...are all part of loving and living.  And miracles happen when we choose to trust the One who has all under control.

The greatest opportunities I have had in this life to glorify Him have been a result of my most desperate seasons.

God miraculously restores us to let His beauty shine from our rubble. He uses us in spite of us.

That is a great find!  (Linking up with Kim's Friday Finds.)