The Cracked Pot: Maybe the Broken Parts Were Never Meant to Be Hidden
There’s an old parable about a woman who carried two clay pots to the river every day. She hung one from each end of a pole and carried them home filled with water. One pot was perfect. The other had a crack running down its side.
Every day, the same thing happened. The perfect pot arrived home completely full. The cracked pot leaked water the entire way, and by the time they reached the house, half of its water was gone.
The cracked pot was ashamed.
For years it watched the other pot do exactly what it was supposed to do while it failed at the same job over and over again. Eventually, it couldn’t take it anymore. It apologized to the woman.
“I’m sorry,” it told her. “Because of this crack, you do all that work and I only deliver half of what you carried.”
The woman told the pot to pay attention on their walk home that day.
“Have you ever noticed the flowers growing along your side of the path?”
The pot hadn’t.
It had been so busy looking at what it was losing that it never noticed what it was leaving behind.
The woman knew about the crack. She had always known. So she planted flower seeds along that side of the path, and every single day, without knowing it, the cracked pot watered them.
God, I love that.
Because how much of our lives do we spend looking at what’s leaking out of us?
The energy we used to have. The plans that didn’t happen. The relationship that didn’t work. The career that changed. The body that changed. The years we think we lost. The version of ourselves we were absolutely positive we were supposed to become.
We look at everyone else carrying their full pot home and wonder what the hell is wrong with ours.
Meanwhile, there are flowers growing behind us.
That made me think about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. Traditionally, broken pieces are put back together with lacquer, and the repaired seams can be dusted with powdered gold or another precious metal. The goal isn’t to pretend the break never happened. The repair becomes visible. The history of the piece becomes part of what you see.
I fucking love that too.
Because I think I spent a long time misunderstanding healing.
I thought healing meant getting back.
Back to normal. Back to who I was. Back to before the hard thing happened. Back to the version of me who didn’t know what was coming.
But maybe healing isn’t going back at all.
Maybe there is no going back.
And maybe that isn’t the tragedy we think it is.
Kintsugi doesn’t take a broken bowl and desperately try to make it look untouched. It doesn’t hide every crack and pretend nothing happened.
It says:
This broke.
We repaired it.
And we’re not ashamed of where the light catches the seams.
There’s something incredibly freeing about that.
Because life cracks all of us eventually.
You can do everything right and still get blindsided. You can make good choices and still lose things. You can pray and still walk through something you never would have chosen. You can be strong as hell and still have days when you don’t feel strong at all.
Divine Grit was never supposed to mean that nothing breaks you.
It means you keep becoming.
Sometimes with a crack.
Sometimes with a scar.
Sometimes held together by faith, caffeine, inappropriate humor and whatever tiny bit of hope you managed to find that morning.
And maybe that counts.
Actually, I think it counts a lot.
The cracked pot thought its entire story was about the water it couldn’t hold.
It never occurred to it to turn around.
There were flowers everywhere.
That gets me.
Because I wonder how many things in my own life I’ve labeled failures simply because they didn’t produce the result I expected.
Maybe something else was growing.
Maybe someone was helped because I understood what it felt like to hurt.
Maybe I became softer in places where I used to be hard.
Maybe I learned what actually matters.
Maybe I learned how to sit beside someone in the dark instead of immediately trying to turn on the light.
Maybe some of the things I would erase from my story are the exact things that taught me how to love people better.
I don’t believe we have to be grateful for every terrible thing that happens to us. Some things are just fucking hard.
But I do believe something beautiful can grow beside them.
And I believe God is capable of using things we were absolutely certain were useless.
Maybe that’s the part we miss.
We spend so much time asking, “Why am I cracked?”
Maybe sometimes the better question is:
What has been growing because I am?
Look behind you.
Seriously.
Look at everything you’ve survived.
Look at the people you’ve loved.
Look at the wisdom you didn’t have ten years ago.
Look at the boundaries you finally learned to make.
Look at the compassion you have because you know what pain feels like.
Look at the person standing here now.
You may not have arrived carrying everything you started with.
Neither did the cracked pot.
But maybe the goal was never to arrive full.
Maybe it was to leave something blooming behind us.
And those cracks you’re still trying so hard to hide?
Maybe they aren’t evidence that you’re ruined.
Maybe they’re simply proof that you’ve lived.
Fill them with gold.
Keep walking.
Let the flowers grow.
Journal Prompt
What part of your story have you been treating like a flaw, failure or broken piece?
Now look at it differently.
What has grown in your life because of it?
What if you stopped trying to hide the crack and started honoring the person who survived it?
Divine Grit
Guided by something higher. Built through something harder.