My life interestingly has become involved with mosaics. I am involved with a mosaic project as part of the Dearne Community Arts’ Festival as we aim to make a community mosaic involving local residents and community groups from the area to exhibit at the festival on 28th September.
I have no artistic or practical experience with mosaics and so the logistics of this project are both daunting and challenging to me. I want the tile pieces to form a coherent picture, not just a random mish-mash of colour, and so I’m having to consult artists whose design skills and flair for this type of thing are far greater than mine. I’m not especially dextrous or fond of mess, so there is a large part of the practical aspect of this project which repels and terrifies me. I’m well out of my comfort zone here and the distance between the vision I have of a perfected mosaic reflecting the individual logos of different groups incorporated into a unified whole and the pile of resources heaped onto a table seems to me too far to be bridged in a matter of weeks!
Yet as I ponder these things, I’m aware that a mosaic is a parable of God’s work in our lives. Mostly our lives seem to us to be a mess. We may start off whole enough, but life, with all its misfortune, tragedy and diffcult circumstances,soon leaves us feeling like broken tiles, smashed into different pieces with jagged edges and rough surfaces with a picture that no amount of sticking pieces together seems to recreate.
Yet just as a mosaic picture in the hands of an artist tells a bigger picture through a variety of broken tile pieces, so God is building His church out of flawed, broken, sinful people, fitting us together with perfect purpose and unity We don’ see the finished picture yet, and at times it’s hard for us to fathom why He allows X or Y to happen to us. We are broken and bewildered, yet He has not finished with us yet.
So I believe my mosaic project, with all its daunting demands, is a valuable reminder to me of the bigger picture God wants to recreated through broken people.
And if you’d like to be involved with the mosaic project, the launch session is on Saturday 1st June (10 a.m. – 1 p.m.) at our church!
