Taking shape…

A button clicked and the machined whirred into action.  The round platform gradually increasing in speed.  The misshapen mass of clay was spinning as well.  The muscular arms of the potter reached out, and with open palms the clay began to be moulded.  With flexing muscles and gentle guidance of fingertips what was once an unattractive mess began to grow into beauty.  Tall and elegant.  Responding to the creator to become all he had dreamed it would be.  Created with intention.  Created for a purpose.  Beautiful and wondrously useful at the same time.

Who knows why it fell?  Yet it did.  Such an amazing future in view, collapsed to become broken and distorted.  Fallen into an apparently useless mass.  The only future in sight now is to be discarded.  That’s what we do with the broken and useless isn’t it?

An ancient man of wisdom went down to the potter’s house, and 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.  Wisdom is to know that the potter doesn’t see ‘useless’ or ‘something to be discarded’.  It is to realise that no matter how broken we feel, or how useless we seem, our future is not destruction but splendour.  We are the clay.  God is the potter.  We are all the work of his hands.  His purpose for each of us is to shape beauty out of brokenness.