​26. We Are the Clay

Write God’s Word on your head and heart.

And also your bathroom mirror.

I do this thing where I gut myself like an unfortunate fish.

I stack up all the worldly “wrongs” I’ve committed like having the audacity to age as a woman. Like letting go of “pretty” one cell at a time to focus on my soul.

It’s walking through a crowded room and everyone turning to stare because you’ve decided to no longer play the game.

And nobody likes a poor sport.

I love this verse from 1 Samuel 6:7: “Don’t judge by a man’s face or height...I don’t make decisions the way you do! Men judge by outward appearance but I look at a man’s thoughts and intentions.”

Oh there it is. Breathing room.

Even Jesus wasn’t attractive according to Isaiah 53:2: “In our eyes there was no attractiveness at all, nothing to make us want him.”

So why waste the years fighting a death that will surely take us whole?

God is the potter. We are the clay. We might think it unfair when we look around and find ourselves lacking. But I recently read an article that put it most eloquently: If God dealt in fairness, we’d never be born. He’d already be aware of the sins we’d commit and keep us from ever committing them.

Instead, he deals in love. Love for our thinning hair and scarred up faces and brittle bones and waning memories and varicose veins and missing teeth and lost limbs and abundant weight and skinny flesh.

Love for the least dear things about us because, to Him, it’s all dear.

It’s all the work of His hands.