Topic: Kintsugi and Redemption — Key Scripture: John 5:6-9
“When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ The sick man answered him, ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath.” — John 5:6-9
There is a detail in this story that is easy to read past but impossible to forget once you notice it.
Jesus heals the man. The man who has been lying at the pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years — thirty-eight years of waiting, of watching others get into the water, of hoping and being disappointed and hoping again — is suddenly, completely, miraculously well.
And then Jesus tells him to pick up his mat.
The mat. The thing he had been lying on in his suffering. The thing that marked his condition, his limitation, his long years of waiting. He could have left it there. He could have walked away from it, left it at the pool, never looked at it again. A clean break from everything the mat represented.
But Jesus told him to carry it.
He was not told to leave his story behind. He was told to pick it up and carry it with him into the new life.
This has always struck me as one of the most quietly profound moments in the Gospels. Because it tells us something important about how Jesus understands the stories we carry — including the broken parts, the suffering parts, the parts we would most like to leave behind.
He does not ask us to pretend those parts did not happen. He does not offer healing as a kind of amnesia, a fresh start that erases the evidence of what we went through. He restores the man fully — and then He asks him to bring his history with him.
The mat becomes the testimony. The mat becomes the evidence of where he has been and what God has done. The mat is not a symbol of his brokenness anymore. It is a symbol of his restoration. But you cannot have the testimony without the mat. You cannot tell the story without the broken part.
I think about this often in the context of soul care.
So many people come into the work of healing wanting to be done with the hard parts of their story. And that is a completely understandable impulse. The suffering was real. The grief was real. The trauma, the loss, the long season of waiting at the pool — all of it was real, and heavy, and they are tired of carrying it.
But the invitation is not to leave it behind. The invitation is to let it be transformed in the carrying.
Your broken places are not the parts of your story that should be edited out. They are the parts that make your story real and important.
There is a Japanese art form that understands this instinctively. When pottery breaks, the artist does not discard it or try to hide the cracks. They fill the broken places with gold, making the history of the breaking visible and beautiful. The repaired piece is considered more valuable than the original, precisely because of what it has been through.
This is what is happening with the mat. Not that the suffering was good, or that the pain was necessary, or that God caused it to teach him something. But that in God’s hands, the broken places do not have to stay broken. They can be healed. They can even be restored. After being healed, months later, when walking and life feel normal again — the healed man can look at the mat and remember the healing and see the beauty in the restoration. To him, that mat is priceless.
At BRKN Soul Care, we do not ask people to leave their mats at the door. We do not offer a version of healing that requires you to pretend the hard parts of your story did not happen. We sit with people in the full weight of what they have been through — the grief, the trauma, the thirty-eight years of waiting — and we trust that the God who met the man at the pool is the same God who meets people here.
Fully. Without requiring them to sanitize their story first.
Whatever your mat is — whatever you have been lying on through the long season of your suffering — you do not have to leave it behind to be welcome here. Bring it with you. Your story, all of it, is part of what you are carrying into the healing.
And in God’s hands, even the mat becomes part of the testimony.
If this resonates with where you are today, BRKN Soul Care is here. Book a free Introductory Conversation at brknsoulcare.org and take the first step. You don’t have to carry this alone.