Beauty in the Broken Glass

I’m late to the game. My Sunday School kids were singing “Soda Pop” non-stop at the beginning of the year, belting out the chorus and teaching each other the dance moves, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Because I don’t have children and my nieces and nephews are teenagers, I don’t always stay updated on the latest movies or shows. Finally, months later, I decided to watch KPop Demon Hunters. 

I’m someone who connects deeply with music and lyrics. A song can crack me open in ways a sermon sometimes can’t. So when I finally sat down and watched Demon Hunters, I wasn’t surprised that the music grabbed me. What surprised me was which song wouldn’t let go. Not the catchy ones my kids were obsessed with. 

I have been playing “This is What It Sounds Like” on repeat. These specific lines keep circling in my mind: "I broke into a million pieces, and I can't go back. But now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass. The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony. I should've let the jagged edges meet the light instead."

I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back

This is the truth infertility forces us to face: we can’t go back. We can’t return to who we were before the diagnosis, before the loss, before the treatments, before the years of waiting. That version of ourselves—the one who believed our bodies would cooperate, who thought motherhood was just a matter of timing, who hadn’t yet learned what it means to grieve something that never was—she’s gone. 

We believed, deep down, even though we knew better, that our worth was tied to our biological fruitfulness. And when that shattered, everything shattered with it. We broke into a million pieces. And we can’t reassemble ourselves into the original shape. 

The breaking shows up in specific moments. The rage that rises when someone announces their unwanted pregnancy. The grief that ambushes you as you walk by the Target baby aisle. The doubt that whispers in the dark: Does God even see me? Does He even care?

There’s grief in that acknowledgement. We want to go back. We want to be the person who didn’t know this pain, who hadn’t been shattered by loss after loss. But the breaking happened. The enemy wants us to stay stuck here, in the grief of what we’ve lost, in the longing to go back, in the belief that being broken means being ruined. He whispers that the shattering disqualifies us and that God can’t use broken pieces. 

But the song doesn’t stop at the breaking.

Now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass

When light hits broken glass, it scatters differently than it does through something whole. The jagged edges catch the light and refract it in ways a smooth surface never could. There’s a Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold, making the breaks part of the object’s beauty rather than something to hide. 

This is what God does with our brokenness. He doesn’t glue us back together and pretend the cracks aren’t there. He fills the cracks with His presence, His light, His glory, and suddenly the breaking becomes part of the beauty. Our brokenness, our infertility, our shattered expectations, position us to see differently. We see cracks in cultural narratives about motherhood and worth that others can’t see. We hear the pain of others who are waiting because we know what it sounds like. We’re positioned to bring healing precisely because we’ve been shattered.

The beauty in the broken glass isn’t that the breaking didn’t hurt. It’s that the breaking created something new, a way of refracting that wasn’t possible before. A way of seeing that only comes through shattering. 

The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony

The song refuses to choose. It holds both. The scars are real. The darkness is real. And somehow, impossibly, there’s harmony too. This is both/and theology that refuses toxic positivity while still holding onto faith. The scar is real, and God is present. The pain doesn’t negate the beauty; they coexist. 

Our scars from infertility can be used in two ways. The enemy wants to use them against us. He uses them as evidence of God’s absence or punishment. He wields them to isolate us, but we can use them as weapons against him. Our scars are proof we survived. They’re proof of God’s presence in our suffering, not His absence from it. They become the very thing that sets others free when we stop hiding them. Darkness and harmony. Both. At the same time. The scar doesn’t disappear. The pain doesn’t vanish. But there’s harmony possible even in darkness, not because we’ve resolved the tension, but because we’ve learned to let both exist in the presence of God. The scars are part of us now. They don’t disqualify the beauty. They reveal it in ways smooth, unbroken surfaces never could. 

Let the jagged edges meet the light instead

Here’s the invitation the song offers, the invitation God has been extending all along. 

“God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). We aren’t talking about exposure therapy or vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake. We are talking about bringing our wounds into the presence of God Himself. Stop hiding from God. Stop waiting until you’ve processed the anger to pray. Stop pretending to be overflowing with joy when spiritually you don’t feel it.

The Psalms are full of bringing rage, confusion, and accusations to God. Hannah brought her bitter weeping to the temple. Job brought his anger. David brought his despair. And God didn’t turn any of them away. He’s inviting us to do the same. Bring the jagged, sharp, unresolved edges into His presence. Because when our wounds meet the Light, the enemy loses his power. The lies can’t survive. And we discover God isn’t afraid of our jagged edges. He’s been waiting for us to stop covering them up so He can do what only Light can do: transform darkness into something that reflects His glory. 

This is what beauty in broken glass looks like. It’s the million broken pieces that can’t go back to what they were, discovering they don’t need to. It’s the jagged edges catching God’s Light and refracting it in ways that were impossible before the breaking. And when we let our jagged edges meet the Light, we give others permission to do the same. When we stop hiding our brokenness, when we let the Light hit the broken glass, we shatter the enemy’s primary weapon: shame-induced isolation. 

Let the jagged edges meet the Light. We can’t go back to being unbroken. But we can become something more beautiful, broken glass that catches the Light and scatters it everywhere.