Jars of Clay

I am probably one of the biggest messes God has ever had to remake into his image.  It must take a lot of spinning on his potter’s wheel to mold me into what he wants me to be.  I’ve been thinking a lot about Jeremiah 18:1-6, which says:

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord.  “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.”  So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel.  But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands, so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.  Then the word of the Lord came to me, “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the Lord, “Like clay in the hands of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”

I’m just a jar of clay.  God made me and keeps remaking me until I’m just what he always wanted me to be. Like the pot Jeremiah watched, I’m marred.  I’ve got some cracks here and there, a few depressions, and I’m a bit discolored in places.  God adds a little oil and soothes away all the cracks, depressions, and discolorations. He keeps molding me until I am the vessel he needs, the one he can use in his Kingdom work.

It isn’t always fun being molded into a new vessel.  It hurts sometimes.  It’s often unpleasant.  Every once in a while it gets downright scary.  But in the end it’s always a blessing too.  The more I sit on the Potter’s wheel, the longer I have to get to know him and the stronger I become in him.  I’d rather be spinning on the Potter’s wheel than lounging at the local celebrity beach.  There’s a purpose to spinning on the Potter’s wheel, and a prize at the end of all that spinning.

God, I am finding out, can use anything to teach you.  Yes, cancer is a HUGE teacher, but so is the voice of a child crying in the night because he’s scared of bed monsters.  Sometimes a few words from a kind heart or a couple lines from a chorus will show me something new from God.  It’s amazing how small a thing it takes to get my attention.  And when I’m really not listening, it’s amazing how large a thing it takes to finally get my attention.

God is not limited in how, when, and where he speaks to us.  I can be in my car, at work, walking down the soap isle at the local Wal-Mart, watching a movie, reading a book, walking in the parking lot, taking a shower.  It doesn’t seem to matter.  God always finds a way.  Unlike me, he always knows just what to say and how to say it.  Me, I stammer around and often use the wrong words or phrasing.  Not God. His words, like his timing, are always spot on.

There are times when God seems like a mighty whirlwind to me, a category five hurricane.  He snatches me up, spins me around like a top, and I wonder where I’m going to get spewed out at.  Sometimes I’m pretty sure I’m not going to like where he tosses me.  It might take me well out of my comfort zone.  It might mean sacrifice.  Things could get ugly.  But I have to believe that whatever God does, he does it for my good, and whatever abilities I need, he will give me.  He will never ask me to do something that he does not enable me to do.

I suppose the biggest issue for me is that God thinks I’m capable of far more and far different things than I believe I’m capable of.  I don’t know whatever gave him the idea that I could do the math involved in taxes, but I suppose it’s that thing about him knowing me before I was even conceived.  My sister is the math whiz but here I am working out formulas for figuring depreciation without using already-invented tables in an IRS publication.  Who’d a thunk it?  Well, that would be God.

I’m not a particularly lovely lump of clay.  Then again, none of us are.  Sin makes us ugly, despicable things.  It’s because of sin that death keeps slyly sending out its silent tendrils to ensnare us and keep us bound to its blackness.  Death knows that once we allow the blood of Christ to cleanse us, the darkness no longer has a place to take hold.  The light of Christ obliterates it in nano-seconds.  Suddenly, what darkness made ugly and dirty the Light makes beautiful and clean.

I used to worry about not being beautiful by men’s standards, now I worry about whether I am beautiful by Kingdom standards.  Have I done enough for him today?  Did I take advantage of the opportunity he gave me to share him with someone else?  Did I let his light shine so that others would say, “I want what she has.  I don’t understand it, and I don’t know what it is, but I want what she has!”