this one's about pots.

i really want to take a pottery class.  my eye is twitching. i hate that. it's probably from stress.


dear diary,

i am an ugly pot. i feel like this weird deformed vessel. one you can tell was perhaps meant to hold something at one time or serve some kind of function. however, time and demand of other pressing project orders, was put to the back shelf. here i am.

from here on this ledge oh! it is hard not to envy the almost flute-like graceful sculptural vases, the milky porcelain plates, the painstakenly painted pitcher, teacups with seemingly everything handed to them--rimmed in gold! were they made just to make me discontented? surely not. how silly.

the Master makes no mistakes. i really do not question Him. some evenings i do watch from my shelf and marvel at His hands i see so clearly-- steady, strong, and expertly skilled at accomplishing whatever it was that He wanted to make. overwhemled, my eyes often move from his craftmanship to behind His worktable. plain earthy mugs holding pencils and brushes.
i squint and try to conjecture what even they must feel like, being used! they are not beautiful, really not even very functional, no handle in which to be held-- but rawly shaped to contain something for the Master.

i look down at myself. "i want to be used!" i want to scream out in my little voice. i'm tired of waiting. "when will be my time?" i breathe into the air.

"it's My time." the Master said. "I made you."




What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! For He says to Moses, “ I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “ For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
You will say to me then, “ Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As He says also in Hosea,

“ I will call those who were not My people, ‘My people,’
And her who was not beloved, ‘beloved.’”
 “ And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, ‘you are not My people,’
There they shall be called sons of the living God.”