Cracks of Gold: Healing as Wholiness
When I used to prepare sermons week after week, I always tried to begin with what storyteller Donald Davis called “the basic human problem”—the BHP. I remember attending one of his preaching workshops over twenty years ago, and that phrase has stayed with me. For The Way of Wholiness course, the basic human problem is this: we believe that to be whole—or holy—we must be without blemish. We equate wholeness with flawlessness, perfection with purity, holiness with spotless lives. And so we try to keep the cracks hidden, as if the broken places disqualify us from love, belonging, or usefulness.
But this is not the way of God. Without suffering, without being broken, we cannot fully understand what it means to be whole. There is the unblemished naiveté of youth, and then there is the healed and forgiven wholiness of later years—a wholeness forged through fire, loss, pain, and mercy.
Yesterday I had the gift of experiencing this truth in a workshop called The Beauty of Imperfection. We practiced Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. We were invited to think of wounds and scars as we broke our small bowls, glued them back together, and painted the cracks. Some thought of old traumas. My mind turned to the chronic pain in my hip and back that I’ve been carrying for six months. To be honest, I have not had enough empathy for those who live with ongoing pain. But as I held my fragile, repaired bowl, I was invited to do something I rarely consider: to honor and even celebrate the pain.
Kintsugi teaches us that the cracks are not to be hidden. They are to be treasured. The repair does not erase the break; it illuminates it. The brokenness becomes part of the story, part of the beauty, part of what makes the vessel complete.
This is what Jesus was getting at when he said, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Too often we hear that as an impossible demand to be spotless. But, as most of you already know, the Greek word telios does not mean “without blemish.” It means “complete, whole, mature.” Maybe, just maybe, we are not complete until we have been broken, until we have suffered, until we have been put back together by grace.
Healing, then, is not a destination, not a finish line to cross after we’ve fixed ourselves. Healing is a lifelong journey of becoming whole—through the cracks, not in spite of them. It is about making friends with our wounds, not erasing them. It is about learning to see even our shadows, scars, regrets, and failures as companions on the journey, carrying messages we need to hear.
This is the heart of The Way of Wholiness: to discover that health, heal, whole, and holy all come from the same root. To live as though every thread of our story belongs. Nothing wasted. Not even the pain.
In the end, wholiness does not mean perfection. It means allowing God to weave the fragments of our lives into a vessel more beautiful than we imagined. A vessel whose golden cracks bear witness to grace.
Because healing is not a destination. It is the sacred way we walk—limping, mending, shimmering with gold—toward the One who makes us whole.