The Fractured Alabaster

A vessel may contain precious ointment and still keep its fragrance sealed.

In late-1920s Shanghai, twelve historical parables follow the imagined lives of capable men and women whose usefulness, intelligence, emotion, eloquence, discipline, and determination have become part of the very outer shell through which Christ's life must pass.

They are not careless people. Many are gifted, sincere, devoted, and deeply useful. Yet natural strength can remain so intact that even good intentions, spiritual knowledge, and Christian service become expressions of the self rather than channels of the life within.

Through disappointment, correction, delay, limitation, misunderstanding, failure, weakness, and the loss of cherished usefulness, these stories explore the breaking of the outer man not as destruction for its own sake, but as God's means of releasing what He has already placed within.

Again and again, the characters are brought to the place where competence can no longer carry them, personality can no longer protect them, and natural ability can no longer substitute for dependence upon God.

The question is not whether strength is evil, but whether it has been broken sufficiently to cease obstructing the life it was meant to serve.

What must be broken in us for that fragrance to be released?

The Fractured Alabaster is Volume Three of The House-to-House Chronicles: Parables of the Little Flock.