Create Beauty From Broken Pieces

This is a story about a single mom, a dumpy house, and creating beauty from broken pieces.

Five years ago, my divorce was being finalized after a two-year separation. The first house my ex and I bought was going to be put on the market AS IS. It was a dumpy old place. It was in the worst part of town, the foundation was sinking, and it really had nothing going for it. It had been in foreclosure when we bought it and the renters had absolutely destroyed it between 2009-2015.

When I walked up to that house for the first time after seven years, I was flooded with emotions. You see, it wasn’t just a dumpy old place to me. That house represented dreams that never came true, including the twins I conceived there and then lost.

Since my ex and I were going through a remote divorce process, it was going to be up to me to get this house on the market and sell it. This project was not too hard for this ex-Amish girl. I’ve never been afraid of hard work. I used to go along to the job site with my dad and brothers. My dad taught me how to lay tile, figure out the pitch of a roof, frame a house, and pour concrete.

I couldn’t accept that this place was a dump. I could still see the beauty in her. So I had to improve her as much as I could before she went on the market. I spent my weekends painting the cabinets and cleaning up the yard and throwing away trash.

I had basically no money, but I spent the little bit that I had to buy the supplies to cover a hole above the kitchen sink with a beautiful mosaic. I always find a way to fix a problem with art. You can break all the rules with art. You can take a mess and create something beautiful. So, that’s what I did.

I bought the glass and tiny stones for the mosaic from Dollar Tree and a craft store. Yep, I was on a Dollar Tree budget. Then I spent long nights piecing it together. Sometimes the pieces cut my hands because I didn’t wear gloves when I handled the glass. This was a labor of LOVE.

The Process

There is something so beautiful about the way I pieced this mosaic together and put it in that dumpy old house before it sold for a low cash offer... You see, I had to commemorate this part of my journey and I had to honor it in order to move forward.

Creating this mosaic healed my heart. As I put together those broken pieces of glass, I was actually seeing how my incomplete dreams and the pain of my past were forming a bigger picture of grace and beauty and purpose.

How will you choose to create beauty from the broken, disappointing pieces in your life?