Psalm 102:15-22 Isaiah 52:7-10
Philippians 2:1-5 Luke 10:1-9
When I was 10 or 11 years old and living in Istanbul, I used to walk home
from school past a small glass-making shop. It always had three or four
workers: one kept the fires hot and spare glass rods on hand, and one or two
had globs of molten glass at the end of their long pipes, turning and blowing
them into fresh creations. Many of these were globes, vases, and glasses of
various sizes, but some were fantastic shapes—animal and abstract, clear and
colored—that captured my imagination.
I would often just stop in to watch them, and they became quite used to this
young American boy who could eke out a few words of Turkish and delighted
in their work. Every now and then one of them would spin out some glass
filaments and make me a small animal, maybe with a long, twisty tail or big
ears, something that I could hold in the palm of my hand and would likely
break before I got home.
My collection never survived, but the memory did, and a question persists:
How did they take something as mundane as a lump of glass and make
something of beauty from it?
Or, to pose it differently, how do we take our lives—mundane as they might
be—and create something of value?
Lent is a time of reflection and self-assessment. Let us use it thoughtfully to
see how we, too, can add worth and beauty to our lives.

–Powell Hutton