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Broken Glass

With a low contented, sleep saturated groan of pleasure, I greeted my Saturday. Sounds of birds filtered through a sleep induced haze. I slowly opened my eyes, gently unfolded myself from my fetal position and relished the feel of cool sheets caressing my skin, With a tiny smile dangling from my lips, I whispered heartfelt thanks for a new day, as the unfolding of my body became a five foot five inches stretch of sheer pleasure. As I settled back into the silence of sleep, the sound of breaking glass ripped into my semi-consciousness, startling me into full awareness. Stunned for a moment, I then realized the sound came from the apartment next door. Hoping that all was well, I tried to grasp at the rapidly fleeting shadows of sleep. After many minutes of futile attempts, I reached across for my laptop, booted it up and let my thoughts flow. I wrote about broken glass.

I am a bit of a klutz, so naturally stuff are forever falling from my hands and I continually bump into objects, (I can see some heads of kindred klutzes nodding with supportive sympathy). Nevertheless, I was distressed when not too long ago, one of my favourite drinking glasses broke. It was a sentimental souvenir from the day I spent at the zoo with a loved one. In one very clumsy moment I knocked it over and it broke into several pieces. Quite distraught, I decided to glue it together in an attempt to save it. Today it stands in my cupboard, not quite as it used to be but just as valuable. I decided to keep it because the value is not only in the purpose it serves but in what it represents.

Sometimes in life, we fall or we are knocked over, and we break. It takes patience and diligence for us to reassemble into a likeness of our former selves. Consequently, for too many of us, the only thing we see from that point forward are the cracks. Living under clouds of despair and struggling self-esteem we push ourselves, or allow ourselves to be pushed to the back of life’s cupboards. The amazing thing is, in restoration our purpose may change but our value doesn’t. I use my broken glass for the planting of seeds. You see, the cracks allow for the easy running off of excess water. It gives the seeds a beautiful place where they can safely germinate and advance to the next stage of their existence. In the breaking, purpose changed but value did not shift. In your brokenness, what seeds are you providing with the perfect condition for germination?

When I look at myself reflected in the surface of my precious, broken, drinking glass; I see a slashed, disjointed version of my face. It reminds me of when I was a kid and a friend and I found an old mirror. It had several cracks littered across the surface. When we looked in it, the images reflected were distorted, twisted, and disconnected. I touched my face to assure myself that what I was seeing was not reality; though on some level I knew that my face was ok. It is so easy to become entangled in the surface images that the broken glasses of our lives reflect. As we gaze into the reflections of our broken situations and experiences, we see a grotesque misrepresentation of the persons we hoped to be. But often, life’s broken mirrors are not a true reflection of who we are. Sometimes, we need to reach up and touch our faces to remind ourselves that despite the broken glasses of our lives, the beauty of who we are remains intact. We need to remind ourselves that the distortion reflected by life is not our governing reality. Sometimes, we need to reach beyond the shallow surface of our lives, to the core of our beings where our value and self-worth lies buried, and gently brush back the soil of life’s hurts and disappointments, to revel the truth that though life’s broken experiences reflect skewed surface images, the beauty of who we are thrives!

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