The sonnet compares the Japanese art of kintsugi—repairing broken pottery with gold to enhance its beauty—to God’s redemptive work in the lives of sinners. It portrays humanity as fragile clay, cracked by sin and left in shards, until the Master (God) intervenes. With divine grace, likened to gold, He mends the broken soul, turning scars into sources of light and beauty. The poem concludes by emphasizing that through salvation, achieved by Christ’s blood, God transforms human flaws into glory, mirroring the kintsugi process where brokenness becomes part of a greater, more beautiful whole.
The potter’s wheel once shaped a fragile clay,
Yet cracks did bloom where mortal hands had pressed,
A vessel marred, in shards it broken lay,
Its beauty lost, by sin’s own weight distressed.
But lo, the Master’s hand, with mercy bold,
Takes up the dust, each fracture to restore,
With golden grace, more precious far than gold,
He mends the soul that wept on life’s dark shore.
Where scars once gaped, His light now softly gleams,
A testament to love that knows no end,
Through shattered lives, salvation’s quiet streams,
Flow deep, to make the broken whole again.
So kintsugi of God, in sinners shown,
Turns flaws to glory, by His blood alone.