To Elaine Comer, people or objects that seem ordinary on the surface can be, in fact, extraordinary. A second-grade teacher at Saint James School in Basking Ridge, in September 2020, she published The Cracked Cup, her first children’s book, which depicts how a flawed little vessel became the centerpiece for one of the Bible’s most miraculous stories: The Last Supper.
In the book, a cup created in haste felt inadequate since it had a crack. It sat on a shelf at an inn and watched as one by one Jesus’ apostles chose other cups to use at the meal. When Jesus selected the cracked cup, it worried that it could not do its job of holding liquid.
“Instead of saying He does not want this cup because it is imperfect, Jesus holds it lovingly. And the cup does a fine job holding the wine that transforms into Jesus’ blood,” Elaine says. “The message is no matter what our faults are we will come through if we trust in God.”
Elaine had written several children’s books while raising her family, but never published them. In 2019, she showed these stories to Sister Joann Aumand, the school’s director, who encouraged her to try her hand at a religious tale. The idea of the cracked cup gelled when Sister Donna Brady set a plain gray chalice on Elaine’s classroom table and asked what she could do with it. “I thought of Christ holding a cup, which was doing its job,” she says. “I realized that like the cracked cup, we all have a purpose, regardless of our insecurities.”
The Cracked Cup has moved some to tears. “The story speaks to people’s souls,” Elaine says. “It lets them know that even though we are all broken, God loves us anyway.”
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