Emerging Blooms

“We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Isaiah 64:8

Seeing Beautiful Again is one of the greatest devotionals I have ever read. It yields such authenticity, only to be paralleled by raw pain in the life of Lysa TerKeurst. She has shared the ugly, the beautiful, the messy, chaotice but healing journey of her shattered heart. It is the type of devotional that no matter what has broken your heart, you will find yourself in the middle of the same emotions of which she has so eloquently, yet painstakingly written.

She shared an impression that God gave her which will bless you and encourage you to push through the circumstances of heartbreak no matter how you arrived. I fully understand the power of impressions sent by God because so many of my ELM writings begin with an image that suddenly came to mind. She saw in her mind a beautiful paper-thin glass flower with a hand reaching out and wrapping itself around the glass applying pressure. As the hand closed around it, the flower popped and shattered. The next image was a shiny steel flower and as the hand closed around the flower, it held firm but created such pain for the hand. The last image was a flower made of white clay. As the hand closed around it, the clay squeezed through the fingers and molded into something different. ‘The hand folded and twisted and worked with the clay until suddenly an even more beautiful flower emerged’ p. 248.

Who of you feels folded and twisted this morning within the circumstances of your life? We all have the heartbreak, our secret suffering, our public journeys, and our unsettled emotions. But none of it is in vain because the Lord uses every single detail of every bit of pain to rework us in an even beautiful bloom. Our adversities will show us whether our faith is the paper-thin fragile flower that will shatter when life pressures us. Troubles will reveal the places our hearts have become hard as steel injuring those who reach out to help. But when we offer ourselves to God for healing and handling, we become more moldable… more teachable…more fertile for the Holy Spirit to do the work and emerge from the heartbreak to the new beginning.

‘Seeing beautiful again requires us to stay moldable by God. We don’t want to be too fragile or too rigid…He wants me [and you] like the clay, able to stand firm but be molded and reformed into whatever purpose He has…God isn’t ever going to forsake us, but He will go to great lengths to remake us’ p. 249.