Breaking Open

On rainy Saturday afternoons when I was a child, I’d pass the time cross-legged in front of my mother’s hutch. I’d open the doors and gently handle and admire all the delicate china. Then I’d carefully return it to its place so I knew exactly where to find it again (ok. So it was exactly where my mother wanted to find it again.) I loved one piece in particular, a milky-pink antique hobnob glass pitcher. It’s fascinating texture was smooth and irregular at the same time. It held my sense of security and things I believed. Eventually that pitcher came to live in my house. After storing it away for safe keeping, I finally decided to place it on display as a visual reminder of what made me feel secure. One summer day in a careless act of dusting, it crashed to the kitchen counter and shattered into 42 pieces. My heart broke along with the vessel I treasured. I wanted to blame and yell at the culprit. Instead, I carefully packed all the pieces into a plastic container and placed it safely on my desk. I kept it, thinking I would take it to be restored. Yet I knew in my heart there was no way to return it to the way it was. So there it sat like a paperweight as I held onto its wholeness in my memory.

 On Christmas day 8 months later, my children gathered around and said they had a special gift for me. I opened the box and as I began to pull back layers of tissue paper, I could see the shape of a cross. I have a collection of crosses in my prayer room so I was pleased to have a new one from them to add to it. But then I peeled back that last opaque layer. There in clear view were all the broken pieces of that hobnob pitcher. No longer the container I longed to hold onto, but transformed – even as it bore the scars of its breaking.

My son had replaced the weight of the glass in the container on my desk with stones! Because I was simply holding onto what I wanted, I never opened it and was never the wiser. But what my heart had not conceived, is the good that could come from the breaking open of what I wanted to hold onto. Scars and all. 

In this together….