We Are All A Work In Progress

Jeremiah 18:1-11

When life gets hard for us… we lose someone we love to addiction, the bottom falls out financially, we endure abuse… it can create a complicated relationship between ourselves and what happened to us. Maybe the hardship was the consequences of choices we made or didn’t make. Maybe the hardship came randomly from the outside.

Some hardships and traumas are simply evil and unncessary. Needless human suffering is not something that should never be sought out nor justified—even if someone manages to scrape out a positive outcome from it.

But it is also true that hardships in our life are opportunities for transformation and deeper becoming. The prophet Jeremiah compared God to a potter who took a soiled vessel of clay and reshaped it into something new and good. “Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? … Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”

It is an admittedly terrifying prospect to consider ourselves as mishapen clay in the hands of a potter. That is a vulnerable place to be—giving oneself over to a higher power to be remade. It is a vulnerability that people in recovery understand, but I think it’s a reality not just confined to the experience of those who are in the journey of recovery from addiction.

We are ALL a work in progress. All of us are clay in the potter’s hand!

And that means that even the worst of hardships can be an opportunity for us to be reformed. Even the most evil of hardships can be a part of how we are reshaped into a new vessel.

And that is a truth that should not lead us to valorize human suffering. Instead, it should be an opportunity for us to become a people who inflict less suffering on one another.

Our children should not be facing starvation and genocide like the suffering children of Gaza. Our children should be facing the hardship of growing up and figuring out the world and themselves instead. I pray with hope and trembling that the current violence of our world happening all over the place could be remade, like misshapen vessels, in the hands of the Divine Potter.

And I hope we ourselves take that as an invitation to be clay that is pliable enough to be reshaped without shattering into pieces. May it be so.