I'm a Little Pinch Pot

Recently a friend of mine, who is an artist, gave me a little pottery pinch pot she had made. It was supposed to be a votive candle holder, but somehow in the firing, or something, it is not quite large enough to hold a votive.

I love my little pinch pot – because my friend made it and it will ever remind me of her.

When I got my gift home, I quickly realized that my little pinch pot is the perfect base for a stone ball I made this summer. The two “made” items look like they were made for each other.

As I placed these artistic expressions on my shelf, I thought of those verses in Isaiah 64:8 “Yet you, LORD, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

The imagery of us as clay in God’s hands has always appealed to me. If you have ever worked with clay you know that it indeed has to be “worked”. Clay usually has to be kneaded until it is soft enough, pliable enough, to be made into whatever the potter has in mind. The potter designs a vessel, an art object, a bowl, then s/he has to work with the clay, shaping it on the wheel, building it up as a coil, or pinching and shaping as my friend had done.

If the pot collapses on the wheel, if the side of a coiled vessel caves in, if the pinch pot doesn’t look as one envisioned, the clay can be returned to it’s lump form, worked again, and then molded again. In fact, that can be done over and over until the desired object has the appearance the potter envisioned.

Isaiah uses this imagery for our lives as well. God is ever molding us, ever shaping us. When our lives collapse or cave in or we just don’t become what He intended for us, He is ever working us and reshaping us to become that image, that work of art that He designed us to be in the first place.

My little pinch pot has been fired, it is dry and the only way to reshape it would be to smash it, grind it to powder and then turn it into clay again.

But we are made of living clay and as long as we walk this life, the Potter is ever ready and willing to continue to shape us into the image He designed us to be – His image.