Broken Crayons Still Colour.

Back when I was a kid, I received a huge Crayola box full of crayons and I felt like I held in my hand, every colour in the world.

I remember how sad I used to be whenever a crayon broke, and how the broken pieces were so small compared to the others in the box.

While the ‘perfect crayons’ stood tall and proud, the ‘imperfect crayons’ cowered below, short and stout. The ‘perfect crayons’ held their place, while the ‘imperfect crayons’ wiggled out of the box and sometimes even got lost. The ‘perfect crayons’ were easy to colour with, while the ‘imperfect crayons’ were hard to hold and even more difficult to colour with.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the brokenness in your life, but you must never ever let your past, your brokenness and your hurt define you, but let them mould you into someone stronger than you were as you redefine what lies ahead.

No matter how broken you may be, what you’re made of hasn’t changed. No amount of brokenness can change that. You are still you, and all of your broken fragments too.

You were created in the glorious image of a God, who wants to carry your hurt and your burdens for you, and He wants you to see you healed and restored and whole again.

You may think you’re a mess right now, but you are one beautiful and unique colour in God’s masterpiece. There is no one like you.

You are your own crayon, full of vibrancy and life. You are purposeful and you add your own signature hue to all you do. There is no colour like you.

You may not see His big picture right now, but God has already drawn the outlines, and He knows where each colour will go to complete His work of art.

God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. His masterpiece consists of a colour palette so beautiful and varied because He uses all the crayons in His box – the broken and the unbroken.

Our past may have broken us, but that does not mean we cannot colour out a beautiful future.

Broken crayons still colour.

So will you.

God’s Delay is not Denial

We live in a society where we want our requests to be granted in an instant. Social media and societal influences affect our lives, even if we don’t know it is. In this era of Instagram and instant noodles, sometimes we find ourselves expecting our prayers to be instantly answered on-demand as well.

We pray and pray for the deepest desires of our heart – for a promotion, or a new job, or for recovery from illness, for a life partner, for anything – and when it doesn’t happen in the time frame we want it to, or society expects it to, we tend to lose hope in God.

When my sister and I ask our parents for things or permission to do something, they either answer with a YES or a NO. Regardless of whatever their answer is, they would always tell us to accept it equally. NO may not be the answer we wanted to hear, but it was still an answer and the final verdict we had to follow, and we had to accept is as easily as we would have a YES.

I like to believe that God has two answers : YES, or WAIT, BECAUSE I HAVE SOMETHING BETTER PLANNED FOR YOU.

Patience and trust can be a tiring ordeal. Many times, this ‘waiting time’ feels like ‘wasting time’, but God makes us wait for a reason, and he allows opportunities and blessings to happen in His timing.

It reminds me of when Martha and Mary asked for Jesus when Lazarus fell seriously ill. Perhaps they looked about anxiously for signs of His arrival. Perhaps with every knock on the door and the sound of shuffling feet outside their home, they thought it might be Jesus finally appearing to save their brother.

But Jesus didn’t come.

The funeral service had been over for 4 days when Jesus finally came to town.

I appreciate Martha for how human she was, how honest and blunt she was for telling it like it is when she told Jesus “If You had been here, my brother would not have died.” This is a natural response. Even I would have been this upset and mad if the only person who I knew could have saved him waltzed into the scene when it was way too late.

While her initial doubt was much like mine, the faith and certainty that followed it was unlike me.

When she said “Even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You”, I wonder what she expected at this point. I mean, her brother had been dead for 4 days after all, what did she expect would happen now?

And yet, with just a word from Jesus, Lazarus’ spirit returned to his body, and he opened his eyes, almost as if he’d just woken up from a deep sleep!

Jesus had bypassed the simple healing of His sick friend in order to perform the far greater miracle of bringing him back to life!

Similarly, when Mordecai uncovered an assassination plot on King Xerxes, the King’s life was saved, but Mordecai was forgotten. His only reward was that his name was recorded in the King’s chronicles.

Later in the story, when Mordecai was to be executed due to the conspiracy plotted by the King’s wicked official, Haman, God decided that Mordecai’s delay was now over. As a result, the King ended up preparing a handsome reward for Mordecai and chose Haman to do the honors and parade him around town, letting everyone know who Mordecai was and what he had done!

Waiting for God’s timing may also give us a greater miracle than we had hoped for.

I read somewhere that the bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants we know of. At first, they appear quite slothful. The bamboo is part of the grass family and doesn’t have any branches, so depending upon the soil and the climate, it emerges very slowly. While there is seemingly no progress above ground, its unique multi-tiered root system is forming taking hold and strengthening its foundation below the ground. And once the roots are ready, some species of bamboo are known to surge upwards as fast as 39 inches in 24 hours!

It is no wonder they are called bamboo ‘shoots’, for the way they suddenly shoot up towards the sky!

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

-Romans 8:28

God’s Plan: More than just a Drake Song!

“For I Know the plans I have for you”,declares the Lord. 

Jeremiah 29:11

There was once a water bearer who carried two large pots, each of which hung on either end of a pole he carried across his neck.

One of the pots had a crack in it, and so, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot always arrived only half full.

This went on every day for two years, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water in his master’s house after each trip.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do.