5 Days to Seeing Beautiful Again by Lysa TerKeurstShembull

Delicate, Not Fragile

As we end our time together, I want to share a powerful picture God showed me when I was walking through one of the most difficult seasons of my life.

I’m not really a “see some sort of vision” kind of girl. So at first, I thought it was just my imagination wandering off for a minute. But then I felt an impression on my heart that this really was from God.

What I saw inside my mind was a beautiful flower made from paper-thin glass. I looked at it from all sides and admired the way it was formed. Then I saw a hand reaching out and wrapping itself around the glass flower. But as the hand closed around it, the glass popped and shattered. The glass was delicately beautiful but too fragile to be worked with.

Next, I saw the same flower formed out of shiny metal. The hand reached out and wrapped itself around the flower and held it for a few seconds. But then once again the hand closed around it. Only this time nothing happened to the flower. It didn’t change in any way. And I could tell the harder the hand-pressed, the more pain the steel flower was causing the hand. The steel was strong but not moldable. The metal flower was too hard to give way to the hand’s desired working.

But the last time I saw the same flower, it was made from a white clay. Every detail was the same except now when the hand reached out and closed around it, the flower moved with the hand. The clay squeezed and moved between the hand’s fingers. The hand-worked with the clay until an even more beautiful flower emerged.

As I asked God about these flowers, I felt the Lord say to my heart, Lysa, I want you to be delicate, but I don’t want you to be fragile. If you’re like that piece of glass, when I press into you and try to make you something new, you’ll just shatter. I also want you to be strong, but I don’t want you to be unmoldable. That steel flower will always just be a steel flower. No matter how hard My hand presses, I can’t make something new from something so hard. You’re already beautiful, but if you’ll surrender to My shaping, I can do a new and beautiful work in you.

I cried as I finally began to understand.

God wanted me to be like clay. The white clay flower was delicately beautiful but not too fragile. It was strong enough to hold its shape but soft enough to allow the hand to reshape it as needed. And in the end, the clay flower wound up being the most beautifully shaped of them all.

It gives a whole new meaning to one of my favorite verses found in Isaiah 64:8: “You, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

Oh, friend, God isn’t ever going to forsake us, but He will go to great lengths to remake us.

We don’t have to be afraid of how He’s going to shape our lives. He is the God who somehow makes everything beautiful in its time.

But seeing the beauty in life again will require us to stay moldable by Him. And it’s only in trusting the gentle but powerful hands of the Potter and allowing Him to remold and remake us that our hurts are able to be shaped into something beautiful.

RESPOND: 

Which kind of flower would you say you are most like right now - glass, metal, or clay? Look back at the attributes of God you wrote down yesterday. How can remembering those truths about Him help you keep your heart moldable?

That aching pain we feel in the midst of our heartbreak is proof there’s a beautiful remaking already in process … but we can’t give up. Find hope in the midst of the most painful chapters of your story as you read about how Lysa Terkeurst survived her own season of heartbreak in her new devotional book, Seeing Beautiful Again. Find out more at SeeingBeautifulAgain.com