Yet God picked up all my broken pieces and re-made me into someone beautiful - and, in His perfect timing, I found new love - the man who dated me and chose me to be his wife.
Periodically during our lives, there are crises that shatter us.
The phone rings. We hear words we never dreamed were possible. Someone we love has died, and we fall to pieces.
Someone turns to walk out the door for the last time and says the words we never dreamed we'd hear: "This relationship is over." And we fall to pieces.
An adult child sits us down and tells us he or she is going to move with their family to another state. Inside, we fall to pieces.
Life is change, - and constant loss. We each have our own stories, our own times when we've fallen apart. And yet in faith we know that each time we have shattered, God has slowly, carefully, gathered every broken piece of us, and then re-made us. Yet, there is a profound difference in the way He re-makes us.
If you like jigsaw puzzles, you eventually develop a method for putting the pieces back together. Some people like to put the outer edges together, like a frame, and then fill in the center. Some like to work outward from one corner. One fact is certain: those pieces will always go back together in the same way.
But when we've been traumatized and have fallen apart, and God gathers our broken pieces and begins to put us back together, God makes careful changes. Because the trial we have gone through has changed us.
First, God removes certain areas of immaturity because they no longer fit. We've outgrown them. In their place, God fits in new pieces of resilience and patience.
God looks at the pieces that held our eyes, shattered by heart-wrenching sights, and gives us new eyes to see life more clearly and with greater courageous wisdom. He removes the pieces that held our mouth, shattered by sobs and bitterness, and gives us a new mouth - a mouth that will always speak truth and comfort with encouraging love.
God looks at the pieces that held our hands, shattered because they were rejected or worn out or were empty from loss. He gives us new hands, stronger, more flexible, unafraid to reach out for new ways and places and people to love.
God searches through the pile of pieces until He finds all the pieces of our shattered heart, a heart so grieving it felt it could never beat again. He finds us a new heart, one that is deeper, softer, more approachable, more merciful, more trusting in its strength to endure. This heart will not shatter. Additional suffering will enlarge it so it holds still more love and tender compassion.
Finally God reaches in deep for our soul. He breathes His Holy Spirit into our soul and the weaknesses and doubts and sins that resulted in or resulted from our trauma are blown away like finest dust.
At last, we are re-assembled. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, the new us is so beautiful that when we look in a mirror, we don't recognize ourselves at first.
"Is that me?" we whisper to God.
"Yes, that's you," God answers. "If you'd tried to put yourself back together, you would have put back all those same pieces of immaturity, bitterness, insecurity, debilitating doubts, and paralyzing grief. Because you can't see yet how you have grown and will grow through and because of your pain. I see everything about you because I love you more than anyone else does. You are mine. So I did the work. See now the King or Queen you really are - for I have re-formed you from your brokenness into reflecting My Image. But now You reflect Who I Am more beautifully than ever before!"
"God, pick up the pieces. Put me back together again. You are my praise."
(Jeremiah 17:14.)