Broken Pieces

The soft, white sand felt like blended sugar and salt and flour just waiting to be scooped up and baked into fluffy cupcakes, but the broken pieces of sand dollars were the only sandy treats I picked up while taking my last stroll down Seaside’s picturesque beach.

Beautiful, yet cracked and chipped, they were the only shells I saw on the seashore that morning. Not even shells, really, just bits and pieces splintered from sand dollars, then tossed around and smashed some more before the tide splashed them ashore.

Picking up one broken piece after another, I tried to make them fit together wondering if was possible to discover a complete sand dollar; but none of the fragments belonged to the same shell.   

A mile of broken sand-dollar pieces on a beach so perfect only God could have created it.

I kept walking, looking for that perfect shell, but only finding fragments that did not fit together.

But when I looked at the broken pieces in my hand, I realized I had chosen the ones with distinct sand dollar markings, that unique five-petaled imprint which distinguishes them from other sea urchins and remind us that they had once been very much alive. Broken, tossed around, and washed ashore, their special sand-dollar imprint clearly spoke to my soul.  

We can crack and fall apart and break. Our broken lives don’t always make sense. The pieces don’t fit together. And sometimes we don’t even fit together with others who believe as we do. But we’re on God’s beach. We don’t wear the human mask of perfection, but the Godly mark of His perfect Son. And our lives, broken or not, can still point the way to Him.

“So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand”

 (Isaiah 41:10).

Lord God,

May the imprint of Your hand and Your heart on the broken pieces of our lives be clearly seen by others today in this world and also after we are gone.

Amen.