Beautiful Pearls

I was about to turn six years old. Many of the other girls in my kindergarten class had their ears pierced, so for my birthday I asked if I could get my ears pierced. A few days before my birthday my mom took me to the mall after school and she surprised me by leading us to the beauty shop where you could get your ears pierced. I was ecstatic! I carefully picked out small turquoise colored earrings (my birthstone) and marched proudly to the chair with the store associate. We lined everything up and just before he made the first hole I asked, “does this hurt?” He smiled and replied with a hand gesture to follow him back to the sales desk in the store. Here he pulled out a piece of paper and a stapler. He placed the paper in the stapler and quickly stapled the piece of paper. Looking back on this event I suppose his illustration was to show how quickly it would happen, but for a 5 year old child who was just learning in school NOT to staple herself with the stapler, I ran out of the store screaming.

It was not until I was 22 years old that I finally found myself back in that chair to get my ears pierced for the first time. The first earrings I had were small diamonds, but I could not wait for the day that I could “upgrade” to some of the fun earrings I had seen others wear. As soon as I made this switch I found that I would pull a sweater over my head and catch and pull them out, or my hair would get caught in them. So, the hunt began for the perfect earring - something that looked good with an array of outfits, but was not the bane of my existence.

Then I found pearl earrings. 

The smooth and round features of this earring allowed for a no-catch sweater experience, they never got caught in my hair, and they dressed up and down quite nicely. What I did not know was that these earrings would become much more important to me than I first realized.

In between my third and fourth year in college I became very sick with an undiagnosed illness. I was living with a kind of chronic chest pain that plagued me 24/7 for, what I would find out in the end was, 2 years.

During this time I found myself at a David Crowder concert. In the second verse of his song “Everything Glorious” Crowder sings, “my eyes are small but they have seen/the beauty of enormous things/which leads me to believe/there’s light enough to see.” I stood there during the concert, listening to these words, and my immediate reaction was to grab my chest. I questioned how this pain could be beautiful.

On the drive home I continued to wrestle with this question. It was in the quiet space of my car, driving along a flat and straight road in Saskatchewan that I heard the Lord speak, “Becca, the beautiful thing about your pain is that you will not be the same person you were when this is all said and done. I am doing a good work in your life. I am molding and shaping you, drawing you to myself, and you will be changed by it. That, my dear girl, is an enormously beautiful thing.”

Then the image of a pearl came to mind. When a pearl has a brown spot or damage it has lost value, but there is a process in which you can remove a layer(s) from the surface of the pearl and in doing so restore it free from blemishes and return or even increase its value. I understood then that although the pain in my life was not beautiful, that the process I was going through was as if the layers would be stripped away and it was the end product of that life journey that would be beautiful.

So I wear my pearls daily, not only for convenience, but because they remind me that no matter what I am journeying through GOD MAKES DAMAGED, BROKEN, and UGLY THINGS BEAUTIFUL.