I was recently reading a book by Lysa TerKeurst and it had a chapter titled "Dust." I thought it was an odd title for a chapter in a book. I surely wasn't prepared for how the chapter was going to make me feel.
Lysa wrote about how there are times in our lives that we are broken. We feel the big chunks of life fall to the ground. Nothing feels the same. In the moment that this kind of breaking happens, we look at all of the pieces on the ground and wonder how we'll survive it. When I look back and try to picture a season in my life when I experienced this type of breaking, I think of my job in Florida. I had relocated down there, for what seemed like, the ideal job situation. Within two years, the company began to downsize and I was let go just three weeks before facing my first spine surgery. I looked at the ginormous pieces of wreckage and thought that it would be my downfall. I have found, though, with this type of breaking, you can eventually pick up these big pieces of your life and glue them back together. Yes, things look different than they did before the breaking, but you find a way to get on with life. I've always tried to look at it like putting a stained glass window together. The picture looked one way before it was dropped on the ground, and maybe you form a different picture when you put it back together this time. Either way, the light is getting through and you start to feel whole again.
The kind of breaking that Lysa is talking about in her book is a completely different kind of breaking. It's the kind where you don't feel broken, you feel shattered. Shattered into a gazillion tiny pieces where nothing is recognizable any more. The kind of shattering where all that is left is dust. There are no pieces left to pick up and put back together. As I was reading Lysa describe the dust, I felt it at a soul level.
Lysa writes,"We think the shattering in our lives could not possibly be for any good. But what if shattering is the only way to get dust back to its basic form so that something new can be made?" She goes on to write about all the ways in the Bible that dust was used for good. She does a fantastic job of illustrating how God can mix our dust with water and make clay. With that clay in HIS hands, He can shape the thing that was shattered into something new. That really resonated with me. I have been thinking on and praying about this concept of dust for over a week. Last night, God gave it so much more meaning to me than the potter's clay.
As I was laying in bed, all I could think about was the dust. God brought to my mind a conversation I had with someone the year that my brother died. He was an organ donor, although it took them so long to get him out of his car, that his organs weren't viable. We gave them permission to take anything they could use. That December, we were invited to a candlelight vigil that was being hosted by the Midwest Transplant Network. It was hard, but Mom and I felt like we owed it to Bob to go. We heard story after story of people who explained where their loved ones organs had gone and the impact it had made. While it had been almost nine months since Bob's death, we had never heard anything about who had received his heart valve, or his eyes. We approached one of the staff and asked how we could find out. She was shocked that we didn't know and vowed to get us the information we were looking for. While we had her cornered, my mom asked her a question that I will never forget. Mom said, "What happened to his bones?"
When we told them they could take anything they could use, that's exactly what they did. They had taken all of the bones out of my brother's arms and legs. We had always wondered what they did with them. This nice lady explained to us that if the bones are particular size, they may keep the bones whole in case someone needs a bone transplant. However, most of the time, they grind the bones down to DUST. We asked the obvious follow-up question, "What do you do with bone dust?"
She explained that when someone has a serious facial injury, the plastic surgeon will take the bone dust and make a bone graft out of it and use it to sculpt the person's face back to a more regular shape. The bone clay then dries out and the person is left with something resembling what was there before. I remember, 22 years ago, thinking that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard.
Obviously, I would have never wished for Bob to die in that car accident. Unfortunately, I had no control over that situation. It does my heart good, however, to think about how God took the dust that was created from that loss and used it to improve the lives of so many people. I mean, Bob was 6'4", that was a lot of bone dust.
There are so many parallels between my current dust storm and the dust storm that almost destroyed me in 1998. I would never have wished for this season of dust either. I am waiting with an eager anticipation to see what God is going to make out of it. He keeps giving me glimpses of what He's working on. No matter what it is that He is sculpting out of the dust, I truly believe that it will be more beautiful and holy than anything I could've imagined before the shattering.
