Fr. Jose Kaimlett An artist who specialized in stained glass windows showed his little daughter his studio. It had walls and even a roof of glass in order to capture as much light as possible. On the workbench lay a heap of glass shards of various colours, shapes, and sizes. These were to be assembled into a stained glass window for the parish church. It was hard to imagine how anything could be made of these nondescript scraps of glass. “You can help me,” the artist told his daughter. “Just hand me one piece of glass at a time when I ask for it.” He laid each one out on a large cardboard the size of the church window. All the pieces fitted tightly together like a jigsaw puzzle. But even after they were all in their proper places, the whole scene was dark and drab. The father smiled down at his daughter and said, “This is where God gets into the picture; he must help me yet. You’ll see how.” Some weeks later he took his daughter into a side chapel of the parish church. He directed her gaze to the window just as the sun was lighting up the little blue, red, and yellow pieces of glass that made up the window. “That’s the window you helped me to put together,” he told her. Lower down on the window, where the sun had not yet reached, the picture of the saint was rather dark; but the more one looked upwards, the brighter sparkled the little pieces of glass. Some were so bright that the girl had to shield her eyes from the sunlight. She stood there spellbound. Then her father explained, “Both you and I worked on this window, for you handed me the pieces of glass. In the same way God wants to assemble beautiful windows like this with you and me and everyone else.”
-Willi Hoffsuemmer
Every day which God gives us, is like one of these little pieces of glass. By the good we do during the day we give it a special colour and then give it back to Him. He fits this piece of glass into His master design, and by and by He makes a large stained glass window out of it. It is our job to let God’s grace shine through us and onto people around us. We are just like the saint in this stained glass window.
