broken pottery | September 8, 2025

Charles Spurgeon said, whenever God means to make a man great, he always breaks him into pieces first. As I've been processing, this season of life, there are seasons that we all walk through where it seems like we're being broken into pieces to be rebuilt into something beautiful. I recently bought a new golf bag, something I love to do. And the golf bag has these gold creases in it. It's an all black bag, but there's these gold veins all the way kinda built intertwined into this golf bag.

And I love Japanese culture. And so when I saw it, I just knew exactly, hey, that's that's that's what I what I want. The reason why is in in Japan, when a when a pot breaks, they don't just throw it away. They actually put gold into a clay that makes and and rebuild the pot to make it stronger than it was before. When you go through these seasons of being broken into pieces, these pieces don't just stay shattered.

God takes those pieces and rebuilds something bigger and better and stronger than it was before. It's his design. When you go through a season of being pruned, the pruning is never something that feels good, but dead pieces have to fall off in order for the good pieces to grow back stronger. A seed has to die before it brings life. A seed is gonna go into the ground and literally die before it brings life.

Tulips, the bulb of a tulip, it will literally hibernate and die so that other bulbs can survive and grow back stronger. So much of life is dying and then being resurrected. There are broken pieces or broken seasons that we all walk through. If we embrace the breaking, then we embrace the resurrection. If we embrace the hard, the pruning, the refining, and we don't resist it, we get gold laced, you know, strings that just bring us back and knit us into something that's bigger and better and stronger than ever.

So what's the point? This week, embrace the breaking. Embrace the hard. Embrace the times at which the Lord decides to prune you. Maybe you've been pruned recently.

Now embrace the flourishing of that pruning. Embrace the fruit of it. Enjoy it. Because there's a season of pruning, there's a season of growth, and then there's a season of bearing fruit. There are different seasons of life.

Enjoy the season wherever you're at regardless of how it feels because if we embrace the season we can get the most out of it. Instead of asking why, ask questions that help you understand what you're trying to learn and what's trying to grow and what's trying to be maybe pruned off of you in that season. Embrace the breaking. So as Charles Spurgeon said, what makes a man great is that he gets broken into pieces and that God then inevitably builds into something better. So in this week ahead, if you are in that season of breaking, know that there is a purpose behind the breaking.

There is a purpose behind the pruning, and you will see it as long as you embrace it. Thanks for listening to Manna Monday.