Jesus Came to Heal.
After a 10-year uphill journey, I no longer see myself as the ex-wife of a transgender individual. I am Ester. God did something for me, and he’ll do it for you because he’s no respecter of persons.
I’ve been through a storm, as many of you have. I looked up the word storm in the Bible’s original languages—Hebrew and Greek. Strong’s Concordance has many words for storm. It can mean earthquake, shaking, flooding, water, rain, and wind. It can refer to a physical storm, but it can also refer to an inner shaking. All these storms—inside us or around us—break things. But God’s good at fixing whatever is broken. He fixed me and continues to do so.
In Luke 4, Jesus says that he came to heal the broken-hearted. The Hebrew word means broken, shattered, crushed, wrenched, ruptured, and destroyed. This brokenness applies to pottery, which was part of my healing. Scripture contains a lot of pottery imagery. Some of us are cracked pots, and we leak. Some of us have ugly bumps or flaws.
When God mends us, sometimes the repairs are visible—tiny seams in the pottery. But that’s okay. Japanese potters like the visible repairs because they show the item’s history and actually make it more valuable. Broken pots that are repaired with precious metal are often put on display. The change makes them more beautiful.
In the West, we like to hide our hurts. I hid mine and so did my former spouse. But hiding was part of the problem. If I had a dime for every person who asked me how to repair a valuable cup, tray, or teapot so the repair wasn’t visible, I could take an expensive vacation. But you can’t make these broken items look like new, because the molecular structure of fired clay is different. Once the heat reaches a temperature of 1,000 degrees, the evaporated water is gone as well as the molecularly bonded water.
I liken the clay’s changed structure to the changes we undergo when we’re traumatized. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all changed because of the fire ignited when a loved one is LGBT. We can never go back to the former state.
I’m a potter. As I work, I often think of the story Jeremiah tells in chapter 18 of his book. God tells Jeremiah to go to the potter’s house and watch him work. In this story, the potter represents God, and as the potter fashions a pot on his wheel, the pot is marred. A potter can fix some mistakes, but sometimes an item is so marred the potter scrapes the mess off his wheel, throws it in a slop bucket, and starts over with a new lump of clay.
But God doesn’t do that. Ever. He remakes that same lump into something beautiful. It may have a different purpose, but it’s the same clay. That was my first lesson in recovery. If you feel like a broken, chipped, or misshapen vessel because of your circumstances, I challenge you to expect God to reshape you into something beautiful. My prayer is that you allow the master potter to remake you into a beautiful, glorious, piece of pottery—seams showing, reflecting the radiance of the Son’s character he used to repair you.