‘We are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.’
What a wonderful image to have in mind as we begin this blessed season of Advent
It made me ask that when a potter takes a lump of clay, sits at the wheel whether they know exactly what they are going to make.
Sometimes that must be true and the potter Edmund DeWaal is famous for producing hundreds of what appear to be exactly the same pots.
Likewise a potter may sit and want to make a bowl because they have received an order for them and so they make six.
However I have dwelt on the idea that on some days the potter my simply sit at the wheel and see where their imagination takes them.
Maybe Isaiah had seen a potter at work one day and seen the work being done as a metaphor for God’s relationship with us, and it’s still a lovely image ‘we are the clay’ he wrote ‘and you are our potter.’
God has created each one of us, we are the clay, the same in terms of physical components but each one of us unique in terms of looks, size and shape, mind and imagination.
God moulds us in our Mother’s womb, we take our first breath and live and in living we learn that as we grow and experience life, we are re-moulded through it again and again.
Life is the potters’ wheel that turns. We are the clay shaped by that life and we are in the business of discerning God’s hands at work in our lives, revealed to us in all kinds of ways. Reshaping and remoulding us as we seek to live to his glory.