This Week At Harbins

A few years ago I heard a foreign missionary from Asia tell a story about a time when he visited a village that was well known for it's beautiful pottery. He said that a local villager took him to visit the home of the town potter so that he could watch him at work on some of the amazing pieces of pottery.

Once in the man's house the missionary observed a bunch of finished pots lining the walls of the room. He wasn't terrible impressed with the pottery as it seemed rather plain and ordinary - not much different than anything he had seen before. As he was looking intently at the unimpressive vessels of pottery he heard a breaking sound that startled him. He turned around quickly to see that the potter had broken one of the pots. The missionary assumed it was a mistake until he was taken to the adjacent room where he saw a whole new set of pottery that, quite frankly, astounded him and left him speechless.

broken pottery

In this new room were pottery vessels that far out-shined the pots in the previous room in both their beauty and elegance. These were some of the most exquisite and artistic pieces he had ever seen. What made these pots so unique and captivating in their appearance was that they were pots that had been molded together from various broken pieces of pottery. The missionary then quickly began to understand that the pots in the other room were not the finished product as he had previously thought, and that in order to get these amazing mosaic-looking pots, the first set of pots had to be struck and broken. The first set of pots were broken by design and the end result was good...it was more than good, it was amazing and beautiful.

In Ruth chapter one, an Israelite woman by the name of Naomi has just had her life shattered. Her husband has died, her only two sons have died, and with those deaths all hope of provision, protection and purpose have seemingly vanished. These hard blows created a heart of bitterness in Naomi. She blamed God for her tragic circumstances and was bitter toward Him. Her theology of God's sovereignty was right, but she had forgotten that alongside God's sovereignty is His goodness. Understanding that God is sovereign without embracing that He is good can often lead to bitterness.

Naomi, whose name means "pleasant," was so upset that she wanted to change her name to Mara, which in Hebrew means "bitter." She accused God of leaving her hopeless and "empty." But Naomi was not empty, she had with her Ruth, one of her two widowed daughters-in-law. And God has something beautiful in mind. He had already begun to pick up the broken pieces of their lives and had lovingly started to mend them together to make something new, something extraordinary. For out of, and through, these terrible circumstances God was bringing together an astonishing love story that would produce in time a great king for Israel, a king by the name of David. And even more amazingly and more beautiful was the truth that out of that line of David God was going to bring the King of King, the Messiah and Savior, Jesus Christ.

The shattered lives of Naomi and Ruth were broken by design, a beautiful plan birthed in the mind of a totally good and totally sovereign God who works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes. Let us all embrace God's sovereignty during the difficult and dark seasons of our lives, but let us not do so at the expense of embracing His goodness and love toward His people. Sometimes our good God must break us by design in order to do something more astonishing and lovely with our lives than we could ever have imagined.