We Are The Clay And Thou Our Potter

It went in a skip. She found out by accident.

Seven weeks of work, and a decision made somewhere above her that it was not going to be used, and rather than being stored or given away it was disposed of, because that was simpler and nobody thought about it for more than a minute.

Nobody was cruel. That is the thing she keeps saying and it is true. It was a practical decision about space made by somebody who did not know how long it had taken and would have been mortified to find out.

She is not angry. She has checked several times and there is genuinely no anger there.

What there is, is something she cannot get out of herself, and it is this: she has taken it as a statement. Not consciously, not as a belief she holds. It arrived as a fact about her, in the way that things do when they bypass thinking, and the fact is roughly: what I make is disposable, therefore.

The therefore is the part with no words after it.

She has begun something new on the bench. She is standing in front of it this morning and she cannot get her hands to start.

You may know that skip. Something of yours disposed of by somebody who meant nothing by it, and a sentence that arrived in you without words and has not left.

Whose hands you are in

Here is a line, and the picture in it puts you somewhere very specific.

But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.Isaiah 64:8

We are the clay, and thou our potter.

You know this image from the wrong side, because you are the one with your hands in the material every day. And here the material is you, and the hands are His.

That is where you actually are: in a maker's hands, being worked on. Not in a skip.

And notice the last clause: we all are the work of thy hand. The same word you would use about a finished piece of your own is used about you, by you, addressed to God.

You are the work of His hand, and that is where you are located regardless of what happened to anything you made. Isaiah 64:8 puts the speaker in the clay and God at the wheel, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman where she is actually standing on a morning when she cannot start.

Now let me be precise about what happened, because precision is what you need rather than comfort.

A thing was thrown away. That is the whole of what occurred. Somebody made a decision about an object and about space, without knowing what it cost, and the object went.

What did not happen is that anybody assessed you. Nobody weighed your work and found it disposable, because nobody knew what they were weighing. There was no verdict, because there was no trial, because nobody was even in the room where a trial would have happened.

The sentence that arrived in you has an author, and the author is not any of the people involved.

You are not what happened to that object, and the two were never joined except inside you. The written word puts you in the potter's hands as the work of His hand, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who delivered a wordless verdict on a woman in a workroom.

The honest half. Seven weeks are gone and the thing does not exist. I am not going to tell you it was not a loss or that something good will come of it, because I do not know that and neither do you.

And I am not going to tell you God arranged it. He did not.

There is a part only you can do, and the order matters because the order is where the join broke. You say what was thrown away. And then you say what was not.