Jesus Came to Heal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ll do it for you because he\u2019s no respecter of persons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been through a storm, as many of you have. I looked up the word storm in the Bible\u2019s original languages\u2014Hebrew and Greek. Strong\u2019s 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\u2014inside us or around us\u2014break things. But God\u2019s good at fixing whatever is broken. He fixed me and continues to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When God mends us, sometimes the repairs are visible\u2014tiny seams in the pottery. But that\u2019s okay. Japanese potters like the visible repairs because they show the item\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t visible, I could take an expensive vacation. But you can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I liken the clay\u2019s changed structure to the changes we undergo when we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But God doesn\u2019t do that. Ever. He remakes that same lump into something beautiful. It may have a different purpose, but it\u2019s 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\u2014seams showing, reflecting the radiance of the Son\u2019s character he used to repair you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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