May 3

The Potter and the Clay

            Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

Isaiah 64:8

When my son was small he loved making things out of clay…but did not like the feel of clay or playdoh on his skin…so he would recruit a parent.  He would bring me over to the table and ask me to make something.  So we would sit down and start working.

At first I would try a snake or a worm or a snowball; but those were created too fast and were not acceptable. 

We would start by working the clay in my hands as we considered what we wanted to create, warming it up and making it more pliable.  We looked closely, observing that my fingerprints were all over the still-shapeless piece.  I would stretch out the clay and roll it, perhaps breaking it into different pieces as an idea started to form.  When inspiration hit…or my son decided that what he really wanted was a clay horse, I would create a rough form of my sculpture and then would start fine-tuning the piece.  Cut part away here.  Add some detail there.  Scrape more away over on that side and so on until we were done.  Little by little the vision would become a reality.  When I would finish, I would sit back and look at the sculpture and feel pretty proud of myself.  Look what we had created.  My son and I actually worked together to make something new!

And then he would grab it and crumple it up, squishing it back into a ball and ask to do it again.

Process.  My son did not want clay animals, he wanted to see the process of transformation.  He wanted to help create something from something completely different.  I wanted a project that we could work on and complete and point to as evidence of time well spent.  He just wanted to see things change.

Our life is a process.  There is a final destination for our lives that involves great wisdom and ability and perfection.  I want to be there now.  I want to be done now.  I want to stop being partly formed and learning through mistakes.  I want the project to be over so that I can be perfect.  The problem is that I am not the potter…I am the clay.  I am the one being formed by God and He is the one who actually knows what He is doing.  He puts me in some high-pressure situations in order to make me pliable.  He cuts away pieces that distract from the final form.  He adds clarity and detail in some places.  He stretches and molds in order to have form match function.  And sometimes when it is just not working, the potter takes the clay off the wheel, squishes it back down into a ball and starts over again.

I am in process, learning more and more each day about myself and how I work and how the world works and how God works.  The amount that I have grown in the past day, week, year or 10 years is staggering.  Where were you 10 years ago?  How much have you changed and grown?  It is amazing.  I am in process.  You are in process.  Our kids are in process…changing even more rapidly at this point than we do.  Where were they 10 years ago?

It can be frustrating to have the same challenges every day.  How many days in a row do I have to tell them to stop eating paper?  However, remember that our kids are in the process of being molded and shaped by their Creator.  This is not their final condition…it is a barely recognizable step on the way to who they were truly designed to be.

A moment to reflect:

Take a piece of clay or playdoh in your hands.  Make something.