Leaning Glass & 5-Pointed Snowflakes

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University
"Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand." Isaiah 64:8
耶和华阿，现在你仍是我们的父。我们是泥，你是窑匠。我们都是你手的工作。 以赛亚书 64:8

Susan Marie and I each have a set of our own breakfast glasses, but because I can never remember whose is whose, she bought me half a dozen unique, clear glasses that leaned like the Tower of Pisa (or Fuzhou's Black Pagoda). I loved them! But they broke over the years, and when I was down to my last one I asked Sue to buy another set of leaning glasses.

Susan Marie laughed and said, "You can't buy anymore like those. They weren't designed that way--they were just rejects!"

No wonder she'd so generously bought me six of them. They weren't Designer Glasses but Defective Glasses--rejects of cheap clear glasses, sold for pennies apiece by a street vendor. It was a bit of a letdown--but only for a few moments.

Then I thought about how much fun I'd had over the years with them, watching the milk or juice fill unevenly (I know: simple minds, simple pleasures). And I realized that whether they leaned by design or defect did not matter. In fact, my last leaning glass was even more precious to me now because I knew I'd never see another one.

I treated my last leaning glass as if it were exquisite lead crystal from Bavaria, but in the end it was broken, and I was forced to drink my breakfast juice from unimaginative humdrum vertical glasses like other mortals. But our Father has a sense of humor, and enjoys nothing more than surprising his children.

Just weeks after I broke my last leaning glass, Sue returned home with a surprise--another half dozen leaning glasses exactly like the ones she'd given me years earlier! I said, "Verily I say unto you, if you give a cup of cold water in my name, you shall not lose your reward--especially if it is in a leaning glass!"

It's all perspective. I thought my breakfast glasses were uniquely designed and it turned out they were just defective, but the end result was the same. It was not the glasses themselves but how I looked at them that gave me enjoyment.

Designer or Defective Lives? My life often leans a lot more than my breakfast glass. I can choose to complain about it, or I can appreciate the unique beauty and opportunities that my uniquely leaning life offer me. My life is not perfect but it is certainly unique--as one-of-a-kind as a six-pointed snowflake.

5-Pointed Snowflakes. Scientists say that with trillions and gazillions of snowflakes, no two are alike. Hard to believe. But if we did find a five-pointed snowflake, would we cast it off as defective? Of course not! We'd treasure it even more than a 5-leaf clover. We'd photograph it, enlarge it, and hang it on the wall as a reminder of its very unique but fragile and transient beauty, and the snowflake itself we'd enshrine in cryogenic storage with more care than they lavish on Lenin, Mao and other extinquished revolutionaries.

Each of our lives is as uniquely beautiful as a snowflake, and while it may be as "defective" as a 5-pointed snowflake, it is our very "defects" that give rise to our unique strengths as we learn and grow and overcome the constraints that we all face.

But like a snowflake, our lives are also fragile and transient. Enjoy it.

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