broken but beautiful

Friday found me at Wrightsville Beach in North Carolina. It is a glorious beach and I thoroughly enjoyed walking up and down its length scrutinizing the sand and searching for treasures.  I picked up a piece of shell whose colors caught my eye.  Varying shades of yellow and gold striped across a shell worn smooth by waves and sand.  When I saw that it was a broken piece of shell, I dropped it back to the beach.  And then God spoke to my heart, "broken but beautiful".  That's me.  That's you.  That's every one of us.  The hardships and hurts of life break us down.  They leave us with sharp edges that can do their own wounding.  They make us fragments of the people that God created us to be.

God will lovingly smooth our sharp edges if we will allow His grace and love and mercy to work in us.  Where the world sees failure and faults and imperfections, God sees possibility.  He sees an opportunity to be strong in our weaknesses.  God sees a chance to make us beautiful in spite of our brokenness.

That shell, an amazing work of art, now sits on my dresser as a daily reminder to me that God sees my brokenness, but He calls me beautiful.