On Mosaics

Admittedly, I've done an incredibly terrible job of starting this blog, but writing the insightful and compelling posts that I imagine takes a lot of energy that seems hard to come by once the work day is done:-p.

That being said, I'm once again going to try in earnest to regularly post. Hope you enjoy!


I struggled a bit in naming this blog. Originally I enthusiastically chose the name "Mosaic" as it resonates with me as a metaphor on a number of levels; however, when I googled the word it seemed like there were about a million organizations with the same name, so I decided to change the blog name to another word that expressed the same idea of many distinct parts coming together to form a whole.

Long story short, I've finally settled on "Mosaic" after all, since, as I mentioned before, it's such an apt metaphor for me in a number of ways.

I've never actually made a mosaic, and I can't say I'm an "expert" on them, but they visually express powerful truths.

Personally, mosaics give me a metaphor for my personal identity. With my family being from East and West Africa, growing up in the United States and building relationships across a variety of cultural lines, my heart feels like a fusion of cultures, some that maybe I can't "rightfully" claim, but that I enjoy engaging with and learning about nonetheless. I love having the opportunity to be a part of communities where I'm not "supposed to be" and expanding my heart to understand the experience of others. My personal experience of crossing cultures is painful and challenging at times, but I continue to find beauty in the process of entering new worlds.

Beyond my personal affinity for mosaics as a metaphor, they're a powerful metaphor for redefining the boundaries between "them" and "us." Socially we have specific ideas about who "they" are and who "we" are. We have drawn clear lines that distinguish the communities we do and do not belong to and somewhere in that process we have deemed these divisions as the right way. Like a number of different colored stones we organize all the blues in one place, all the greens in another and the yellows in yet another space. We have envisioned for ourselves an existence of like with like; same with same; them with them and us with us, and when we disrupt that vision by crossing cultures, we find it strange or jarring.

The funny thing about mosaics though is that all the pieces (the blues, the greens and the yellows) get mixed up into a pattern that looks vastly different than when all the pieces exist in homogeneous groups. In mosaics you can put fragments of different sizes, shapes, colors and textures into one visual piece and it makes sense--is beautiful even. It's not odd or strange or weird, but perfect.

Mosaics visually represent what God has the power to do with our communities. The Creator redefines "them" and "us" by weaving together all of our broken and distinct existences. Through Christ, He has connected men and women of a multitude of ethnic, socio-economic and life backgrounds and made us a family. In His classic divine way, He's ruined our understanding of who belongs with whom. We may think that we make sense in our communities that are divided along lines of experience or class or culture or race or whatever other socially defined role you want to use, but we don't make sense until we're together.

Like the fragments in a mosaic, we're often broken in the way we relate to one another, and so different in many ways, but God shapes us into a community that is imperfect, but perfectly loved that reflects divine artistry.