To be honest with you….this has been a very long and arduous week for me. I know all of you can relate. I want to be able to go into the weekend giving you something to read, or at least impart to you some brilliant reflective piece that will make you say wow. But I just don’t have it in me today or the last few days. So I’m not going to make it up.
This has been a very transitional stage in my life for me, as I adjust to being newly married (10 months); as I come to the half-way point of another graduate school program; as I wind down my fourth complete year as the full-time college director of The Quest; and as yesterday, April 20th marked the 20th anniversary of my mother dying from breast cancer. I originally wanted to post something yesterday remembering her, and honoring her, but I ultimately felt that what I wanted to say and express was best said with no words at all, as I shared that time with my family and with God.
I definitely feel like “clay” who is being shaped by the potter, yet I don’t know exactly what shape I am going to take as I feel like the potter is continuing to re-work me into something that seems “good to him” (Jer. 18:4). But I am reminded by my grandmother who is 90, and by another that the potter never takes his hand off the clay:
“The skill of the divine potter is an infinite patience of improvisation. No sooner has one work gone awry than his fingers are pressing it into the form of another. There is never a moment for the clay, when the potter is not doing something with it. God is never standing back and watching us; his fingers are on us all the time,” (Austin Farrer quoted in Susan Howatch, Absolute Truths, 482).
So in this time of transition I wonder what God is shaping me to be? What will the ministry look like next year after I have graduated most of my long-standing leaders, and my first class that I have seen through from freshmen to seniors? What is my graduate program shaping me to be, or in what ways will it influence how I do ministry? What will marriage look like in the next year? All very exciting things, but things ultimately that I do not know for sure. But in the midst of this time I know that I worship a God whose hand is continually upon me, molding and shaping and forming and re-shaping me, into exactly what He deems to be good….into who He designed me to be.
May you have a restful weekend, and may you reflect on the imagery of the potter and the clay during this time in your life. And may you know that God’s hand is always upon you, shaping you into the person He has created you to be.
