Memorial Box Monday: The Broken Crock

The package from my mom arrived in the mail just before Christmas.  I’d say that we put it under the tree, but I’m not even sure that we had a tree that year.  Christmas morning came and I anxiously opened the box, finding all the makings for a pasta dinner nestled into a stoneware crock.  Earlier that year I’d asked my mom to keep an eye open for a crock, for I had fond memories of meals served in them as a child.  The older I got, the more I found myself appreciating the things I’d taken for granted and had left behind in a cross-country move.  As I reached into the styrofoam packing peanuts to pull out the crock, however, I pulled out a triangular shaped shard.  It was  .  . . BROKEN!

Just like me.

A week earlier I’d had a third miscarriage, and was devastated.  For a year and a half we’d been trying to start a family.  At the beginning, we thought we had it all planned out ~ when we’d conceive for the best birth date to match up with the school calendar so that I could have the best combination of maternity leave and summer vacation before returning to my teaching job in the fall.  I was confident that I could control this aspect of my fertility as easily as I’d prevented children for the first years of our marriage.  The stack of books beside my nightstand grew as I read every book our local library had on conception and pregnancy.  I was ready ~ or so I thought.

Our first pregnancy came six months after we’d made the decision to start a family and we were overjoyed.  Before I could even make it into my first doctor’s visit, it ended.  I consoled myself with the thought that “at least we know we can become pregnant” and continued on somewhat less confidently than before.  Four months later we again had an early loss.  This time I comforted myself with statistics (surely after two in a row the next one would stick!) and the thought that the timing wouldn’t have been “right” to mesh with my teacher’s schedule.  Eight long months later we conceived once again, and made it further into the pregnancy than before.  We were hopeful, despite a roller coaster of conflicting signs.  A week before Christmas, that pregnancy ended.  This time there was no confident reassurance of statistics, no self pep-talks.  A year and a half after deciding to start a family we were further away than when we’d begun.  All my best plans had failed.  I was simply . . . BROKEN.

It was at that point that I could finally lay aside enough of myself to hear that God had been speaking to me for many months, but that I’d been too sure that I knew where I was going to listen.  As I pulled shard after shard of broken crock from the packing peanuts, the tears rolled down my face.  This was me ~ I was in pieces too.  One day over Christmas break I spread newspaper out on the kitchen table, and painstakingly glued the crock back together with super glue.  I couldn’t mend my brokenness, but I could fix that crock ~ that was my thought process.  That Christmas break was the beginning of my restored relationship with God as well.

For the longest time I felt guilt about the crock.  I didn’t want anyone to know that it had broken (even fibbed to my mother when I called to thank her for the gift!), and tucked it away in a cupboard.  As God has put me back together these past few years I’ve come to realize the powerful gift He has given me, and what a tangible reminder of that the crock is.  It has been moved from its hiding place in the cabinet and set out in the open as a reminder to me of just how powerful God’s healing hand is in our lives.

For more about Memorial Box Mondays, visit Linny's blog A Place Called Simplicity.


(originally published on one of my other blogs a few years ago)