Broken to Beautiful and Back Again

At our 2011 Create in Me retreat, our theme was "broken, but beautiful."  Our community art project involved a plexiglass cross, which we filled with broken objects:

In the end, it looked like this:

I wrote about that process here.  I loved the whole process from the breaking of the pottery to the filling of the cross.  I loved seeing how the broken bits came together in a beautiful new creation:

I've been back to Lutheridge several times since we created the cross.  It's given me great joy to revisit the cross, to remember making it, to photograph it in different lights.  Look at how the plexiglass lets us see inside the cross, while also reflecting the outside world:

Maybe that's why I felt sad to learn that just before our 2012 Create in Me retreat, a huge storm system moved across the mountain range, and the cross tipped over:

I wanted to salvage it.  I came up with all kinds of ideas, including a plan with duct tape and a tree.  In the end, we all agreed that some times, you must let an art project go (for more on this idea, see this post at my creativity blog).  One of the camp's pastors pointed out that a year is a good run for an art project to last at camp.

My poet's brain loved the idea of taking brokenness and creating a thing of beauty.  I was not prepared for the thing of beauty to return to a state of brokenness.  And yet, metaphorically, it works.  Creation has not yet been fully redeemed, although the process has begun.  The passage from beauty to brokenness, back and forth, seems to never end. 

Yet Christ promises that at some point, it will end.  All will be made new.

I am glad to have had a year with this cross.  I will miss it.  I will remember it as a companion to the labyrinth (created on the old tennis court), a testimony to rebirth, a partner on the journey.