Potter and Clay
May 27, 2011
Rebecca Friedlander
Often our world can become complicated with schedules and deadlines, goals and achievements, and in our attempt to be focused we create a kind of tunnel vision for our souls. Our calendar is made up of lines and boxes, our day is divided into squares of time allotted to one activity or another, and sometimes we find that people will not always fit into our nicely divided world!
One day it dawned on me that God calls Himself an artist. He is not simply the scientist or governing magistrate where everything must be “just so”, but in the context of Scripture we find Him to be… Creative. In the first verses of Scripture we see His Spirit hovering over a dull, empty world and speaking Life over it. He moves like an artist to paint light and shadows and reaches down to form man from the dust. The Hebrew word for “formed” in Genesis literally means to squeeze into shape as a potter… then the Artist God breathed life into His favorite work… us.
Thousands of years, later God spoke to us through art.
“Go down to the potter’s house,” He told Jeremiah the prophet. Jeremiah watched as the potter bent over the wheel; his hands immersed into shaping a new vessel, his eyes riveted and intimately connected with the rhythm of the clay, his movements were detailed and sensitive yet unwaveringly strong. Suddenly “the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter”. The work of art collapsed into a mess of wet, soggy mud.
I am a potter, and when I sit at the wheel, sometimes I wonder if I feel a bit of what God feels. The pride of creating a piece all your own, the enjoyment of spending time developing the creation, and the wonder of making something beautiful from an old lump of clay (I’ve used clay from my driveway before!). I also feel wonder when the scriptural account reveals that the potter took that marred mess and “made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.” Oh joy! I don’t have to live with the sagging disappointment of a life that cannot be satisfied by uncompleted lines and boxes. And when life takes an unexpected (and sometimes devastating) turn of events, I look at the fallen piece of clay that is marvelously being lifted and transformed by the potter’s hands and hear my Father say, “Cannot I do with you as this potter? Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand!”
Sigh of relief. I am so glad that God is an artist. And that He is not finished yet.
Scripture Jeremiah 18: 1-6
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