6 Jan 2021

I live next door to a church, which runs an active and vibrant (ie noisy) day care centre.

I generally refer to it as ‘the Baptist church’ or ‘the daycare’, but on my morning walk around the block with the dog, I got to musing about the name of the church – Mosaic.

Yes, there is a body shaped mosaic attached to the front of the building, but the more you think about the name the more you can extrapolate on possible meanings. I know some theologians who could work out a decent sermon on the theme, but that’s beyond my pay grade, so I’ll just jot down a bit of literary diarrhoea instead.

I have a friend who’s an artist, and one of her many and varied skill sets, is producing amazing mosaics. So of course I picked her brain first about what constitutes a good mosaic. Her opinion? Flow of the pieces, balance and above all the correct colour grout.

Now let’s deviate from the facts with a bit of diarrhoea.

As the dog stopped for about the hundredth time to sniff something vitally important, I pondered the thought that we are each, individually, a mosaic.

Our mosaic is made up of random bits and pieces of stuff. Some of those pieces are broken. Some are formed through trial and error and quite a lot of hard work, and some are just a bit strange, a bit out of left field, but ultimately work nicely in the art project that is us.

The cement that holds us together are our morals, possibly our upbringing. But the stuff that forms our personal mosaic are a hodgepodge of influences, good and bad experiences, interests and skills.

Like my friend Jo said, the balance of the pieces is the ultimate sign of a good mosaic. A nice balance of broken, of quirky, of deliberately formed parts makes for a good piece of art that is our lives. Too much broken, too much quirky, too much manufactured, and we have an unbalanced life.

And our grout? Our relationships. Whether family or friends, the right grout is what makes our mosaic more than just a bunch of stuff attached to our body by life. Our grout blends all our odd bits and pieces into a piece of art.

Here endeth today’s sermon. I’ll take up the collection now 😂