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“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”
- 2 Corinthians 4:7
The longer I live, the more tempted I am to believe that brokenness is a carnal ideology used to make sense of a spiritual phenomenon. We define people and things as broken based on their usefulness to us, perceived societal worth, or in comparison to others. If something is broken, it is inferior. Purposeless. If something is fragile, it could easily become that way, which makes it less preferable.
So why on earth, does Paul in this letter, compare the church of Christ, the vessel carrying the hope of glory, to a clay jar that will crack and shatter?
“to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.”
Maybe what we see as shattered, Jesus sees as submission.
This idea made me think of women. While the verse is obviously written to and for all members of the church, I wanted to tell the story of weathering that so many women experience. From the seasons of feeling unblemished and new, to having hands full of fruit and cracking under the weight of blessing, to those moments where life completely undoes us and we feel like we are left picking up fragments of ourselves.
I thought of the young girls full of innocence and promise. I thought of the mom constantly trying to balance it all. I thought of the woman dismissed for her age that came from a different world and raised us in ours.
I thought of how these women see themselves, and how they bear the weight of their breaking.
What if, in order to show our Lord’s surpassing glory, our clay was necessary? What if our perceived inadequacy and shortcomings was the very thing God entrusted to us, so the more broken we become, the greater His glory will be revealed?
If that is true, then perhaps the more our cracks cut through, the more visible our treasure becomes.
Your beauty does not reside in your ability to have it all together or know every answer. Real beauty resides when we become the women who can still find joy in chaos, faith in persecution, and obedience in brokenness. May we be women who steward our fragments well, because the glory they hold is what makes us beautiful.