A friend of mine once compared her testimony of the gospel to a wall. She told me that all of the discoveries she was making were like tiny cracks in this wall and that while she might have been able to find answers to all of the questions and concerns, there were just too many.
I didn't really understand it then and I have to admit...I still don't.
It got me thinking about a story I had heard.
"The ancient Japanese discovered beauty in brokenness. When a ceramic bowl broke they tended to fix it unlike us who are used to throwing it away. A 15th century Japanese shogun sent a broken tea bowl back to china to have it repaired. It was returned to him in one piece but the way it had been repaired made it look ugly. He asked some Japanese artisans to fix it. They developed a method called Kintsugi which simply means ‘golden joinery’. The craftsman used a process where gold dust was used to highlight the cracks and fractures of the bowl. Instead of trying to hide the brokenness, they used gold to highlight it. And these bowls became some of the most valuable pieces of property a person could have. Everyone loved the beauty the cracks provided. In fact they would come to break vessels just so that they could be fixed by the Kintsugi craftsmen. These artists became some of the best craftsmen in the country because even though the break was more obvious, the repair was more beautiful."
I wanted to find the truth.
But that's a little trickier than one might think. People often say that the truth is simple. And it is. History, however, is not.
So I dug and I researched and I looked for sources that I felt were reliable.
It cost me hours upon hours of digging and studying and I found that things were inevitably skewed.
But during this process, my cracks had been filled with gold and now I am stronger.
