Have you ever tried Pottery? It’s incredible.
You start with a lump of clay—no shape, no form, no obvious purpose. Then you begin working it. Pushing it down, pulling it up and slowly shaping it into something recognizable.
But here’s the thing, sometimes it doesn’t work. In fact, if you’re as bad at pottery as me, it doesn’t work at all.
The clay becomes too thin, a crack appears, the shape collapses, or in my case it’s a hideous piece of clay that looked way better in my head. But the best thing about working with clay is that you don’t have to throw it away! Instead, you press it back down and begin again.
I feel like that’s a lot how God works with our life. Most of us have had moments when we’ve looked at our lives and thought, This isn’t what I thought it was going to look like.
A plan falls apart. We make a decision we regret. A relationship changes. The future we carefully imagined suddenly looks completely different. It’s easy to see those moments as failures. But a potter sees things differently. The shape may have changed, but the clay still has potential.
God actually uses this picture in Jeremiah 18. He sends Jeremiah to a potter’s house, where Jeremiah watches a vessel take shape on the wheel. When it doesn’t turn out as intended, the potter reshapes the clay into something new. Then God says:
“Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” — Jeremiah 18:6
The clay is reshaped, but it never leaves the Potter’s hands.
Sometimes we confuse being reshaped with being rejected. Something goes wrong and we assume we’ve ruined God’s plan. We change direction and wonder if we’ve somehow stepped outside His purpose. But Philippians 1:6 reminds us that the God who began a good work in us will carry it on to completion.
God isn’t finished.
We often look at our lives from somewhere in the middle of the process and try to judge the finished product. But we can be works in progress. We can make mistakes. We can change direction. We can become something different from what we originally imagined.
If your life doesn’t look the way you thought it would, that doesn’t mean it has lost its purpose. You may simply be in the middle of being shaped.
We are the clay, He is the Potter. and He’s not finished yet.