Pottery

? Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand. Isaiah 64:8

My parents house has a little cellar.

It’s divided into two little rooms. When you come down, you enter the first room, and it looks like most cellars do. Shelves of food, boxes of potatoes and pumpkins, and two freezers.

But to the left there is a door, and when you look through that door, you come to the more unusual part of the cellar. It is my dads workplace. He has a more normal workplace in a shed in the garden, with tools and seeds and such, but this is his pottery workplace. If you can’t find him anywhere and it’s summer, he’ll be somewhere in the garden.

If you can’t find him anywhere and it is winter,? he’s bound to be in his pottery workshop.

I love coming in there and taking a peek. There’s always something interesting to find. Or just to chat with dad while he is working on t

he wheel. Making something new. Sometimes he makes something that I really think very pretty. Then, without a wa

rning he takes it of and squished it into a plain old lump of clay again. I cry ‘why?’. He says ‘ it wasn’t good enough. The bottom was to thin’. I didn’t think so. I though it was very well the way it was.
Sometimes I think I am very well the way I am. I don’t think Jesus should meddle any more in my business. Can’t He accept the fact that I’m human, and overlook that little defect? Isn’t it good enough yet? But He doesn’t think so. He’s a perfectionist. A very patient one. He finishes what He starts. And He’ll start all over again from scratch as many times as it takes.

I love pottery. Because it is an art. It’s unique. Each pot is unique, no matter how hard you try to make it look like the others. Dad is good at making sets of pots, which all look like each other. But he doesn’t make them exactly alike. He loves the tiny little differences that make each one unique. They belong together, but still they are separate. They each have their own character. Just like we all have our own character. Our differences. We are all unique. And just as dad lovingly handles each pot when it is finished, looking it over with a satisfied look in his eyes, Jesus looks at us. Just as carefully as dad makes a pot on the wheel, that’s how carefully Jesus handles us. Sometimes dad cuts a line somewhere, with a tiny little stick, or knife. It might hurt while we are being made into what God want

s us to be, too. But it’ll be well worth it in the end.

Pottery seems to bring bible times closer. Makes the time span between then and now seem shorter. There are quite a lot of bible verses on it. I don’t think anybody ever tires of reading them. They are so easily understood. Descriptive. We are the clay in God’s hands. God is our Maker .

Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker, to him who is but a potsherd?among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, `What are you making?’ Does your work say, `He has no hands’?

Isaiah 45:9

The newest thing on dad’s creations is his ‘signature’. It’s an ‘S’, the first letter of his name. The curly part represents the pottery wheel. underneath is a fish, that also looks like a clay bowl. (woe to me, I didn’t notice that at first. But my very smart husband did see it immediately!)

I love it that from now on, everything he makes will be marked. Maybe years from now I’ll see a pot somewhere that I recognize. And I’ll always be able to check if it was made by dad, because if it is it’ll have his signature on there.

Do other people see that we have Christ’s signature on our lives? Are we marked by Him?

For we are God’s workmanship. Eph.2:10

??

(Putting the clay cups in the oven to be baked)

Linking up with ‘Thought provoking Thursday’ and GoodMorningGirls