Sound of Surviving Blog

Earlier this year, I helped one of the students where I volunteer make a collage for her art show. I had found scraps of paper & words, quotes, stickers, etc., and we used Mod Podge to layer everything onto a blank white canvas. The other day, a picture of it came up on my phone, and I couldn’t help but notice how uniquely beautiful it turned out. No, it wasn’t perfect. But the best pieces of art often aren’t.

Looking back at this project made me realize something I never truly thought about before. The first thing I realized is that our lives are kind of like collages, all of the pieces of our lives are strung together to create a beautifully constructed, sometimes messy and chaotic, us. Just like the scraps used to create my student’s collage, if we look at these pieces of our lives, on their own, we don’t see the beauty they add to the bigger picture. Those torn-up scraps of paper or quotes didn’t look like anything special on their own, apart from everything else.

I think all the little pieces of us, of our lives, are like this, too. Especially when we look at the less happy moments in our lives, the relationships lost, the health issues and challenges struggled with, the battles faced, the jobs we lost, by themselves, we wouldn’t see that these things have all helped build our character and who we are inside and out. But if we look at them as a part of the bigger picture, we start to see that because we persevered through the unimaginable, because we trekked on in the storm, we get to do this, or be that, that we get to see God turn our scattered ashes into us, a masterpiece of beauty made up of all these little tiny, shredded up, tattered pieces.  We don’t always see the bigger picture, of how God works all things together for our good. We tend to just see what’s happening now, and only focus on that, but if we look back on it, we can see how every little thing in our lives happens just perfectly.

If we only focus on the ashes of our past, we’ll never see the beauty that comes from them.