Picking Up The Pieces

Reflections on Ecclesiastes 3:1-11, Matthew 19:26 and Patsy Cline

I fall to pieces …

           

Terri’s life was beginning to feel like a country western song.  While that certainly wasn’t her taste in music, it was the music she was raised on, with a father who yodeled to bluegrass and a mother who loved The Grand Ole Opry.   Of late, the radio in her head kept repeating Patsy Cline’s, I Fall to Pieces ... just the chorus, as if there was a skip in that old record.  It was no wonder really.  In the fall of her forty-second year, the business that she had started with her husband failed and they declared bankruptcy.  It wasn’t long after that that his drinking, which had always been a problem, became abusive.  In May, Terri had left her husband and moved in with her parents.  As if that wasn't enough, within a month, Sammy, her twelve-year-old Jack Russell terrier, had to be put down after a sudden series of seizures.  In between jobs, in the midst of a divorce and having lost her most loyal companion, Terri’s life had indeed fallen to pieces.      

The First Lisburn Presbyterian Church had fallen to pieces too, in an instant.  The year was 1981 and Northern Ireland’s troubles were well established and flashes of violence were not uncommon.  On a Wednesday evening in August, as local shops were closing, a car, that had been parked on Market Street, just around the corner from the church, blew up.  In that instant, shops and offices and the church were devastated.  Of greatest concern to the members of the Presbyterian congregation was the lost of seventeen stained glass windows, some shattered and in pieces and some left twisted in unimaginable formations of lead and glass.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

The writer of Ecclesiastes understood life’s propensity for ups and downs.  There is a time and season for everything: the good, the bad and the indifferent.  There is a time for success and a time for bankruptcy.  There is a time for love and a time for marriage and even a time for the divorce, cutting your loses and demanding better for yourself.  There is a time to enjoy the unconditional love of a canine companion and a time to say goodbye.  There are times for love and times for loss.  There are times for independence and leaving your parents’ home and occasionally times to return.  There are times when you have it all together and times when it all falls to pieces.  Life is just that way.  And although it seems at times meaningless and haphazard, there is something more, a thread that weaves hope in and through the broken pieces.

God has made all things beautiful for its time.

The members of the First Lisburn Presbyterian Church couldn’t bear to toss the pieces of broken stained glass in a dumpster as if they were trash.  Even before a plan was hatched, the pieces were gathered, because what was broken was still highly valued.  It wasn’t long before the way forward became clear:  these colored shards of glass, once beautiful could be beautiful again and this time more profound in their beauty.  Soon a new stained glass window was commissioned, a window to be made from the broken pieces.  In 1987 the new window, entitled The Resurrection Window, was dedicated with the following inscription:

The Resurrection Window

“This window is a memorial of the bomb-blast of 5^th August, 1981 and the subsequent restoration of our church and halls.  It is a tribute to our neighbours in shops and offices and their will to overcome disaster.  It is an echo of the motto of this town: EX IGNE RESURGAM (I will arise from fire.)  It is a witness to our faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Terri too had broken bits of her life to contend with, her heart and her dreams had taken a hit.  They were in fact shattered, but she was not willing to throw them away either.  Her heart and her dreams were still of great value and so she picked up the pieces and kept them safe until the times and the seasons began to change.  And change they did. 

…with God, all things are possible.

God indeed can make beauty out of broken glass and broken people.  In God’s time, seasons change and beauty is crafted out of pain and even loss.  I don’t know how God does it, but I have seen it again and again.  Broken hearts and broken dreams pieced together by a loving and purposeful hand. The result is never what is expected, but always beyond what one could imagine.  However, God can’t heal what we toss away, only what we gather up.  Sometimes all that separates one season from the next is the picking up of broken pieces.