photo courtesy of ©Depositphotos.com / sgudak
The thing about being an artist is that sometimes you get stuck on something and you just can’t get past it until you’ve found some way of expressing it. Journaling helps, flow-charting, stuff like that – but sometimes, even if you’ve revisited an idea or a concept or an angle on something twenty times in conversation with the people from whom you’re looking for perspective, or with God, or with yourself – there’s still something to it that you know you’re just not seeing yet, and so you go back to the beginning again, start new conversations, or have new variations on old ones, until you get it right. It’s like a potter with a clay bowl that just isn’t shaping well, and so he mashes it down into a ball, gets it wet again, and starts all over.
I suppose that particular image is completely appropo – I feel like in some ways that is what God is doing with me. My life had shape, it was starting to feel like it might even be significant and useful, but something wasn’t shaping up right, and I am back to being a ball of messy, soggy, somewhat slimily disgusting yet oddly fascinating potters’ clay with unlimited potential but no real concept of what I’m going to be. My significance and usefulness are no less valid for the mashing – in the mind of the Potter, I will still become what He intends for me to be. I just need reshaping, I guess.
Being shaped is stressful. Too much stress in one area and I will collapse. Not enough in another, and things get lumpy. (More reason to give up my firm belief that ice cream is a food group and be a little more disciplined about eating veggies.) And yet God knows what He’s doing – and when it is finally time for me to become what He’s shaping me to be, I will become it, and the process, while stressful, will be positively so, and there will be a beauty to it that I can only imagine now.
I’ve always wanted to be Beauty – the kind, gracious princess who, in spite of her fears, risks everything for love and transforms the Beast – but I guess maybe, at least for this season, I see a little bit more of the Beast in myself. I’m not sure how I feel about that. But at least there’s redemptive hope: the Beast does experience unconditional love and transformation – and that is the story into which I get to live.
