We Are More Beautiful For Having Been Broken

I collect words of all sorts, but my favorite ones are words from other languages that don't totally translate into English. The other day, I came across the Japanese practice of kintsukuroi.

I think that going through hard times makes us more beautiful. The old adage "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true." Donald Miller posits in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years that our lives make better stories when there's conflict and adversity. Who wants to see a movie or read a book where the hero is just handed whatever he or she wants?

It also reminds me of a great line from Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which I found as an epigraph from the heart-wrenching book Columbine by Dave Cullen.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

How are you stronger and more beautiful at your broken places?