Christia DeShields

I had the thought the other day while on a run.
What if God wants to use your ugly art?

Not the polished version.
Not the cleaned-up testimony.
Not the carefully curated narrative.

But the real one.

When I look at Scripture, and when I look at my own life, there is precedent for this. God consistently takes what looks broken, messy, or insignificant and turns it into something beautiful.

“He gives beauty for ashes” (Isaiah 61:3).
“They will rebuild the ancient ruins” (Isaiah 61:4).
“God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27).

Our entire faith is built on redemption.

My husband and I were driving separately one morning, dropping off kids at school, and our conversation turned reflective of our testimony, our story. There was a season where I used to ask God, Why did this have to be part of our story? Our very public wedding was called off. Painful transitions. Seasons that didn’t make sense in the moment.

For a long time, I thought those parts needed to be erased before anything good could come from them.

But now I wonder, what if God always planned to use those exact moments?

So often, we feel like we have to “clean it up” before God can use it. We wait until we’re healed enough, confident enough, successful enough. But throughout Scripture, God rarely works that way. He steps into things mid-process. Mid-mess. Mid-story.

Even creatively, I see this play out. There’s a blogger I follow who will spend hours crafting the perfect piece of content, only for the most random, unplanned one to go viral. Not the overworked one. The raw one. The honest one.

It’s a reminder I need often: sometimes we overthink what God just wants us to release.

This isn’t permission to stay stuck or glorify brokenness, but it is an invitation to stop disqualifying ourselves. To stop believing God only uses the refined version of us.

What if the unfiltered version is exactly what someone else needs?
What if your “ugly art” carries truth, connection, and redemption?

God has always been in the business of rebuilding ruins.
Maybe the very thing you’ve been hiding…
is the thing He wants to redeem for His glory.

So today, I’m pondering this question, and maybe you need to hear it too:

What if God wants to use your ugly art—just as it is?