A Kaleidoscope Of Faith
Have you found that this year feels like you’ve been going around and around in a rotating tube, struggling to keep up with the continually changing walls that once felt so safe and secure? Seeing the reliability of our day to day lives change during this season we have now found ourselves dependent on the things we used to take for granted. What once was fixed and decided, now seems altered and unsteady. However, maybe we need to look at things through a different lens and let God reflect His goodness and grace onto our lives by allowing the array of His colours to slowly turn our relationship with Him into a kaleidoscope of faith.
If you don’t know what a kaleidoscope is, it’s a cylinder that has two or more mirrors that are set at angles that create different patterns from bits of coloured glass or plastic. As you put the kaleidoscope up to the light, look through the hole, and rotate the tube, you see the continually changing patterns that the fragments of glass or plastic bits make.
Watching the fragments of our faith rotate around and around like a kaleidoscope, we wonder if there will be any shapes or patterns forming as we develop in the tube of God’s love. We believe that a good God could never use our broken, scattered pieces and turn them into something beautiful. So, we try our best to modify and amend our life. We smile and respond in ways that look neat and tidy, bringing our unwavering control over every cracked and fractured piece that feels different and unlovable. The only problem with this kind of thinking is that we don’t feel complete. Somehow in our feeble attempts to fix ourselves, we get a nagging sense of restriction and containment by our performance-based, perfection that leaves us totally in the dark.
However, through the ever-changing sequence of these past 9 months of the pandemic, I have found that God never wanted my faith to be static and rigid. He never asked for my faith to be perfect and modified. He rotated all my bits of coloured glass and let me see through His lens. He showed me how He had turned all my fragmented pieces into something beautiful.
The secret to this kind of faith? I decided to come out of the shadows of control and let God’s light shine through my brokenness.
I let His kindness and goodness reflect off my rotating, defective pieces, and through the process, I discovered the key to developing this kind of faith is that you need to be pointed towards God’s light. It is only then that you can see how God uses every piece of your cracked and damaged parts, turning those fragmented pieces into beautiful patterns that will help other people see His redemptive grace.
The more we try to restrict and restrain the direction of our faith, the less likely we will see God use our fractured pieces to draw people closer to Him. As humans, we tend to shy away from light. We like the darkness because it keeps things hidden. John 3:19-21 points this out to us, ‘And here is the basis for their judgment: The Light of God has now come into the world, but the hearts of people love their darkness more that the Light, because they want the darkness to conceal their evil. So, the wicked hate the Light and try to hide from it, for their lives are fully exposed in the Light. But those who love the truth will come out into the Light and welcome its exposure, for the Light will reveal that their fruitful works were produced by God’ (The Voice Translation)
Through the struggle and the wrestle of giving our unhealthy, messed-up pieces to God, we’ll discover that the exposer to His light will only bring truth and clarity to our faith, not containment lines or limits. A kaleidoscope of faith reveals that it was God all along who rotated our lives around and not ourselves. He has a way of shattering our misconceptions and false belief’s so His light shines and His glory is revealed through our broken pieces.
Stay close to God during this season, dear friend, and let your kaleidoscope of faith reflect His goodness through you. Watch God continually turn your life into something beautiful, and use your broken, scattered pieces to point people toward His light.
How has God turned your broken pieces into something beautiful?
