24th September 2025

Recently I fell down the stairs from my flat, sustaining six rib fractures. I’ve only broken my tibia before, just above the ankle, playing football over forty years ago. When breaking a bone, it’s reassuring for the patient to remember that where new bone growth bridges the gap created by the break, the bone will be thicker and stronger than before.

In TV’s The Repair Shop, skilled experts reconstruct broken ceramics, reassembling the pieces using adhesives, fillers and paints, so no-one would guess the item had once been shattered. Recently, the Japanese art of Kintsugi has become better known in the West. This way of repairing broken pottery uses gold, but the difference with Kintsugi is that after repair, the gold is visible, deliberately so, tracing the lines of the breaks. The ethos of Kintsugi is to take something broken and make it more beautiful than it was before! So, one repair method conceals the damage; the other draws attention to it, celebrating that healing has taken place.

Christian Aid’s Restore autumn campaign is based on the Kintsugi principle: to “construct a giant ‘pot’, held together with prayers, hopes and dreams for our broken world. The ethos of Kintsugi is the perfect analogy for our Restore campaign, which seeks to challenge injustices and create a more just world.”

Sometimes, it’s best that damage in our lives – psychological, emotional, spiritual – remains hidden; but where we can acknowledge that God’s golden touch has ‘put us together again’ others will surely be encouraged. What is important is that God has been at work, and healing has taken place.

David Bell