kris mcneil photography

The 365 Blog Circle is a collection of friends working through their 365 photography projects together. We are posting favorite shots on a monthly basis. Welcome to our January circle! 

Hello 2018! Hello Blog! It’s been a minute (as all the kids are saying these days).

I swear I wasn’t hiding under my covers all of 2017. In fact, My oldest son got married in August and we all could not have asked for a better day. (I wrote about my son and his wife in my December 2016 post ).

Photo credit Randy Coleman Photography

On to 2018! One of my favorite things about January was getting to be part of a Beauty in Brokenness gathering run by my friend Amy Hauser. Beauty in Brokenness is part of Amy’s Mosaics of Mercy ministry. The mission of Mosaics of Mercy is to support the community struggling with addiction and mental health issues through education, helping people find support and also through helping the community come to see that “there is beauty in brokenness”. They seek to inspire recovery through “testimony, intentional prayer and artistic expression”. To say that Amy is all in on supporting the community would be a vast understatement. Her mission is one of great challenge, but also great love. Being broken, be it a little or a lot, is nothing of which to be ashamed. In fact, the more we share, the more we can support each other. My town is blessed to have Amy as a resource.

I met Amy though my running group. Yesterday, through Beauty in Brokenness, a few of our running friends and I got to be part of a network of love by working mosaic hearts. This is a finished heart:

So here’s how it works!

The pieces represent the brokenness in our lives. As Amy said, we all have a plan for our lives until the plan changes. Mosaics of Mercy is first and foremost a Christian ministry. The idea of the artist building and creating the heart is meant to symbolize how letting God in to be the artist of healing brokenness can lead to something beautiful. People come to make hearts for themselves or to share with others to show them they aren’t walking their crisis alone.

Here’s my favorite part. Those hearts we made, we didn’t take them with us. We made one, finished one that someone else had started, and then took home a completed heart. We, and those who came before and after our gathering, were building a net of love and support. Each step of the heart building process has meaning and Amy was careful to express each step of the process. Building mosaic hearts is a tangible way to perceive letting God be the artist of our healing. Very simply: we need a foundation, to gather our broken pieces and construct something new, to not be afraid when trials come along and we lose sight, and to trust in the care that the Artist will put into us.

We started by picking the pieces we wanted to use on our hearts. What fun that was!

Amy even let us break dishes! Now THAT is some good therapy! I definitely had some fun with that.

Stop! Hammer Time!

We then put some thin grout onto pre-cut plywood hearts and then started to place our pieces.

At this stage, we had done everything to these particular hearts that we would do. Now they were left for someone to come after us and do the remaining steps. Our group shelved our hearts and continued working with hearts that a gathering before us had constructed.

And here is where God comes in to smooth out the rough edges.

These hearts were left behind to dry, but Amy had hearts for us to take home that were finished and polished up and prayed over. I’ll always remember this day. Thanks for all you do, Amy!

Please continue around our 365 circle! Next stop is the the fabulous work of Alyssa Kellert! Enjoy!