Faith | We may be broken from time to time, but God can mend us

My earliest memories are of sitting on my grandparent’s wrap-around porch in Nevada, swinging my legs off the side. Every once in a while, my Gramps would sit next to me.

We mostly sat in silence, but my heart would sing with joy every time he spoke.

A potter by trade, he would talk about the different types of clay that the earth produced. It could be used for just about anything, from creating shelter to healing wounds.

Because I was a small child, he would remind me to watch my step while in his shop. Some pottery pieces were sturdy and solid, and others were more fragile and needed to be approached with caution.

“Can’t we just glue it back together?” I’d ask in defiance. He would chuckle and go back to whistling a tune.

In a moment of recklessness, I accidentally knocked over a gorgeous white urn my Gramps had just finished making.

Beads of sweat poured from my head. I hung my head in shame, and with tears in my eyes, I told him what happened. Then with silvery eyes, he gave me a stern look, followed by the biggest smile I had ever seen.

“Good thing we got glue!” he said.

I sat by his side watching him glue every piece back into place.

When he was done, I squealed, “You can’t even see the lines!”

His nonchalant response has resonated with me since that day: “Sometimes you can’t even tell it was broken in the first place, and if it does show, it adds character.”

At age 19, I submitted an application to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I would serve for a period of 18 months in Dallas, Texas, and I was determined to shape myself into someone my family would be proud of. Someone God would be proud of.

Three months into my mission, something in my mind broke. I had no desire to eat, sleep, or do the very thing I was there to do—testify of Jesus Christ and God’s love. I wept silent prayers to God begging him to fix my mind.

“Maybe they won’t know I’m broken,” I would say to myself.

A very quiet response to my plea, “You’re not broken” filled my soul.

With difficulty, I returned home from my mission sooner than planned. With my head hung in shame, again. I thought of the embarrassment I would face for not serving my mission for the full time.

I went back to my grandparent’s home where I felt safe and could hide from the world. When my visit came to an end, I said goodbye to Gramps.

He took my hands in his, callused from decades of manual labor and throwing pottery; he looked me square in the eye with those same silvery eyes, and whispered, “You’re not broken, and I am so proud of you.”

Genesis 2:7, says we were created from the clay of the earth, and the first breath we inhaled was of God’s exhale. Maybe we missed it – that he would be in the dust to be with us. He would crawl to the lowest parts of the earth to be near us and fill our lungs with air.

The hands that created me and held me close, are always waiting with upturned palms and a very quiet, “You’re not broken” to fill my soul.

The same hands that sent his only begotten Son to mend us and help us feel whole are the same hands that created me. God saw what I could become, and never gave up on me.

This story was originally published January 21, 2024 at 5:00 AM.