When Brokenness Is the Beauty

The arts have been used by God universally throughout history to bring hope and redemption out of pain and chaos; for example, the Japanese art form, Kintsukuroi, which repairs broken pottery with gold and reckons that the restored piece is more valuable for having been broken. From Jehoshaphat placing the singers in front of an army on a suicide mission, to concentration camp artists painting butterflies on barbed wire, to two beaten missionaries singing in a jail, followers of God have always employed the arts to bring the beauty and hope of His redemptive truth into the ugliness of devastation. As Henri Nouwen so well put it, “Friends, we are wounded healers.” And no one can demonstrate that better to hurting society than the artists.