Early one sunny spring morning, I went downstairs from my bedroom into our kitchen to make myself some coffee. As I put the grounds in our espresso machine and waited for my milk to froth, I felt defeated. The night before, my husband and I had been lying in bed and I had one of those moments where I should have held my tongue but instead decided to bring up everything he had been doing that bothered me. (If you are engaged or newly married or have even been married forty years, I highly recommend you do not do this).

I knew I had hurt his feelings because the tone of his voice completely changed. I was instantly convicted of what I had done and realized I needed to apologize. After I said I was sorry, we both rolled over and tried to go to sleep. I tossed and turned for hours, replaying what I said over and over, making myself more upset at what I had done. What I said to him was not out of a kind and loving heart but rather came from the stress and bitterness I had been feeling from work, relationships, and the devastating situations I kept seeing on the news. It took me forever to fall asleep because I felt like the worst wife in the world. 

As I waited for my coffee to brew, terrible thoughts played over and over in my mind. How could someone love me when I just pointed out everything that was selfishly bothering me? How do I deserve to be loved by this selfless man? I don’t deserve forgiveness. I feel like a fake in every area in my life. What started as good conviction turned into a big spiral of lies. I know now they were thoughts from the Enemy and completely not true. But they felt so real to me at the time. They ate at me and made me feel like my brokenness was just plain ugly. I felt shame. If only I could take back everything I had said and everything I had made my husband feel. I kept wishing that I could just be a better wife. 

Finally, my coffee was ready. I poured the frothed milk over my iced espresso and prepared to spend some time with Jesus. As I was walking from our kitchen into the living room, I noticed a blue image that was reflected onto the wall behind our front door. As I stared at it, I realized that the rising sun was shining through the blue stained-glass window. The window I always complained about. 

You see, when my husband and I moved into our house, one of the things I really disliked about it was that it had random stained-glass windows. They are not the beautiful modern stained-glass windows. No, these have pink roses on them that make you feel like you are in the movie Beauty and the Beast. Our front door even has a little blue stained-glass window. It made no sense to me and was something I couldn’t wait to replace. In fact, when people came over to the house I would say, “Don’t worry, we’ll eventually be getting rid of these windows.”

But this particular morning, I saw something I had never noticed before. Cast on the wall was a perfect image of the door’s stained-glass window. You could see in detail every broken piece that had been used to make it a true work of art. For the first time, I saw its beauty. And it brought me joy.

As I went to the living room to read my Bible, the Lord interrupted my thoughts. It was as if He said, Allyson, you are just like that window. You are often broken and shattered—too broken to put yourself back together. And yet there is beauty in your broken pieces, and I see the masterpiece that you are. It was a beautiful revelation; I visualized the Lord taking each of my broken pieces and putting them together, binding them with His love and grace. Just like in a stained-glass window, each broken piece is hand-placed into a very specific spot by the Artist Himself. He makes a beautiful masterpiece out of what we thought was a disaster.

I know that all of us have had very hard and painful things in which we have walked through in our lives. Have you had experiences that you feel can never be redeemed or used for good? Do ou feel as if there are things in your life that keep you from fully living in your identity as a child of God? If so, I want to remind you that our God is a redeemer. He takes what the Enemy meant fro evil and turns it into something good. He is not a God who inflicts pain, but rather He takes the pain that we have experienced in this fallen and dark world and shines His light into it. He is a God who is in the business of redemption, of creating beauty, not of shaming and belittling.

God takes our shattered pieces and creates a marvelous mosaic. I love to picture Jesus gathering all the broken pieces of glass that represent us. He grasps each piece so gently with His loving and careful hands. He speaks life and purpose over each piece. Then He starts creating the masterpiece. He picks up the shiny pink oval representing the traumatic event I saw as a nurse. He then chooses the periwinkle triangle that denotes the anger and bitterness of my heart and places it next to the oval. He picks up your emerald-green hexagon, the one that represents your strained relationship with your mom, and places it next to the cherry-red square that symbolizes the abuse you experienced as a child.

He does this with every shattered part of who we are. God wants us to see the beautiful masterpiece that He sees in each of us. 

God doesn’t stop with the arrangement of our pieces. He then shines His light through us, creating a reflection of His masterpiece through our once-broken fragments, now made whole in Him. And notice this: It isn’t the stained glass itself shining but rather the Light shining through it.

How different God’s view is from that of Satan–who loves to showcase only the individual shattered pieces. I know it is so easy to fixate on the one destructive moment, the mistake we made, or the horrible thing we witnessed. But remember, that one piece doesn’t define us. When it is placed among all the other fragments, it finds its home. It is washed by the grace of the Father. It has a place in the masterpiece of who you are.

In my home that morning I was reminded that the light of the Lord never stops shining, just as the sun never stops shining, even if we can’t always see it. His light is always shining through you, my friend. You, with all of your broken pieces bound together by the grace of the Lord, are a walking reflection of the love and light of Jesus Christ.

Excerpt from Arise and Shine: How To Be The Light That Ignites Hope In A Dark World by Allyson Golden