Fixed!

I really enjoyed being part of the Kintsugi Hope course over the past three months. If you’re unfamiliar with the Kintsugi Hope course it’s based on the Japanese art of putting a broken pot back together. Using gold or silver to join the broken parts, a restored pot becomes something of unique beauty. It’s a powerful symbol that even when life breaks us, we can be beautifully unique. In fact, it’s better than that. It’s powerful symbol that in the eyes of a loving God, that’s exactly what we are. The course explores some issues that we can all struggle with (and probably do even if we don’t admit or are simply unaware of it), issues like honesty, shame, self-acceptance, resilience. Over the course we had the opportunity to talk about these things. As the weeks went by we felt more confident in the group to share what was really going for us, what we really found difficult. It was a place we could talk openly and honestly. The beauty of the course is simply that it gives a space to do that: to talk openly and honestly about important issues that affect how we are, how we see ourselves and affect how we live. What this course doesn’t do is to fix us. It seems that many people who call themselves Christians, feel they have to be perfect! No, it’s true. It really is true. It’s certainly true to the degree that we often find it hard to be honest with others and ourselves because if we tell others what’s really going on, we’ll be judged as a failure, or at least not a very good Christian. We like to tell a version of the Christin life in which things get fixed. How many testimonies have you heard where life was at one time all bad, then God turned up and it’s all great now! Most testimonies I’ve heard tell that kind of story. Trouble is, most of us live different lives to that kind of life. And, it seems to me there’s a version of Christianity spoken in which we believe that if God really is present with us, there won’t be any challenges. I think this kind of belief does a great disservice to everyone and is not a good way to understand how life with God actually is. Actually, I think it’s just plain wrong. Not everything gets fixed. Even for Christians. There are challenges, struggles and issues that we will wrestle with maybe for our whole lives. And we would do well to recognise that and to talk about it with others. I’m not saying that nothing ever changes. It can and it does. I’m not saying that God never intervenes and helps us, sometime in miraculous ways. He does. But I am saying that to pretend we don’t wrestle with big stuff a lot of the time, sometimes for life, to pretend we have to be perfect, or even vaguely close to perfect, is not a good way to live and is not a Christian way to live. If we were to take a look at the people who appear in the stories in the Bible, we would see very quickly they were all fallen, flawed human beings who made mistakes and never really got fixed! But they were also people used by God who had a beauty and uniqueness in his eyes. I think the big takeaway from Kintsugi Hope is that it’s ok not to be ok. That we are beautifully unique in our brokenness and that God loves us anyway. That we don’t need to be fixed and some things won’t be fixed. But that if we are honest with ourselves and can find it in ourselves to be honest with others and to walk with them, then we might find we are changed along the way.