WHEN ALL WE SEE IS DUST
I was on my bathroom floor, surrounded by debris. This was not how it was supposed to go. I had planned it. The vase was supposed to break into chunks that I could piece back together and I would repair it so that the gilded cracks became a reminder of how beauty can live in brokenness.
That was the plan. But the careful strike of my hammer wrought something different. Instead of manageable pieces, I was grappling with jagged edges that would not hold together and smaller shards that were pummeled into dust. What was supposed to be a picture of healing was instead a symbol of being shattered beyond repair. Anything big enough to handle tore strips in my flesh and the rest were useless. Which was probably a better reflection of my reality than the gilded pottery I had envisioned. My life in that moment looked more like a pile of rubble than a symbol of redemption. Dirt and dust.
I wanted some profound restoration and I got a mess.
And sometimes, that’s when faith fails. Sometimes we can trust God through the breaking but not the healing.
Sometimes marriages don’t heal. Children don’t come back. Innocence is not reborn. People don’t change
Sometimes we get the rubble. And when the pieces don’t come back together, sometimes our assurance that God is who He says doesn’t either.
GOD CHOOSES THE DUST TO CREATE NEW THINGS
I hate dust. I want to sweep it up, forget and move on. Dust reminds me of the places in my life that feel wasted, of wounds too wide to heal and places where people have taken a hammer to my life.
But dirt and dust work differently in God’s narrative. Our whole story with God starts with dust. God could have used anything when He created man. He had just flung the world into motion with a word. The sound of his voice birthed time and space. His breath hung the stars. A god like that could have summoned anything to make the height of his creation. He could have used something precious to bear his image. Something beautiful.
Instead, God chose the dirt: God formed man of dust.
Everything else, God spoke into being. But God does something different for Adam.
He forms him.
I picture God, his fingers in the dust, his brow streaked with dirt, moulding the ground like a potter causes clay to yield under the warmth of his hands. Choosing the dirt. Picking the nothingness of his creation – the refuse, the dust – to know him and look like him.
GOD DOES HIS BEST WORK IN DUST
Except hands in the dirt is not enough for God. He goes further. God stoops to what He formed until He meets his creation face to face, mouth to dust, life to death. God stamps his reflection on something that could not summon itself into being. Something that could do nothing by itself to look like God. That’s what God chooses to shape into his likeness.
This intimacy with dirt weaves through God’s story.
God turned dust into gnats to free his people from slavery.
Jesus used dirt to heal a blind man.
Jesus used dust to rescue a woman from condemnation.
And God’s son was born in the dust.
Dust and dirt are where God shows us his justice, his compassion, his mercy, his redemption. All without pretending that dirt is anything other than what it is. God does not sugar coat our experience. Our bad things are really bad. The brokenness God uses is really dirt. Our dust is not inherently good. It is not silver-lined.
But God still breathes. Even on dust.
When we have been pummeled into pieces and can’t be glued back together, when our circumstances are shattered, God remembers that we are dust. And his story reminds us that with an infinite universe at his fingertips, God still chooses to create from dust.
Putting the pieces of our lives back together may not be the point. No matter how much I want God to stitch me up, He may be doing something new. He may be forming new life from dead ground. The dust that makes me most wonder where God is may be the canvas where He most shows me who He is.
There is hope when we are beyond repair because God does his best work in dirt.
Face to face, mouth to dust, death to life.
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