Recently I ate dinner at a wonderfully fancy restaurant.

It was a perk of this new gig and it was fun.  (I giggled at myself a little inside though.  I was served oysters and bone marrow and beef cheeks and scallops and pork belly and champagne with fizzing pearls of sugar and chocolate covered strawberries with gold dusted on them and yet, I live in a house with approximately three Mount Rushmores of sullied laundry due to the dryer’s week long refusal to cooperate with the game plan and there is an unwelcome mouse in my kitchen, a dining room table often loaded with school books and notebooks and art supplies and Legos knee deep in kids’ bedrooms, but I ate about thirty-two courses before coming back home in my pumpkin chariot at midnight.)

None of which is the point of this post.

At this restaurant there was a light fixture.  A work of art.  A focal piece.  A center stage sort of design.

I cannot recall how many light bulbs are hanging here.  60?  600?  (I’ve never been good with the placement of zeros although I recognize their importance.)

The lightbulbs are all hanging from fiber optic threads.  And the fiber optic threads normally wouldn’t have the bits of light shining through them.

Except.

When the artist designed this piece, he bent the fiber optic threads past a ninety degree angle.  Far enough to almost break them, but not quite far enough to really break them.

And then, at that nearly breaking point, at the exact spot where the thread is basically broken but not disconnected, guess what happens?

The light shines through.

Look closely.  Each little sparkle of light is actually radiating from where the thread has been just about broken.  Just about wrecked.  And then, right before it is ruined, it’s put back into its straight place and the light bursts through in miniature glimpses.

All those threads.  Nearly busted.  Just about cracked.  Wrecked – almost.

And then — redeemed.

Straightened.  No longer crooked.

And the light shines through.

And it’s more than just the light shining through.  When all of the broken pieces are strung together across the room, high up in the ceiling there, it looks like art.  It’s pretty.  It glows.  It attracts attention.

It’s beautiful to look at.

It is not a succession of strings of broken thread.  It’s a cohesive and organized pattern of seemingly random threads that create one unified creation.

I was texting a friend tonight as we commiserated about a few new sorrows.  Her life story looks painfully like my life story and there’s been comfort and deep sadness in that mutual suffering.  And threaded through our words of struggle and encouragement, raw and hopeful, was the reminder she mentioned, comparing this year to last year.  This feeling to last year’s feeling.  How much faster joy comes now for both of us than it did last year.

And it made me think of these lights.

All the broken threads.

The mess and the tangle that it all sometimes looks like.

And the beautiful light that shines forth too.  Shines forth exactly where it should not — in the broken bits and pieces.

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