A new meta-phore

You know how in the Bible and in well known poems and certain songs, the Christian is compared to clay? The comparison is made that God is the potter and we are the clay, and so God molds us into the shape that he desires, and he doesn't ask us what kind of bowl or pot we want to be, he just makes the way he sees fit. It is interesting to note that God is a very skilled potter, since he has made all different shapes and sizes of pots, even square ones-quite difficult since usually the potter molds the clay on a wheel..it would be hard to make a square pot on one of those, and yet God does. And, also interesting is that usually potters make certain types of pots that they are good at over and over and over again, and sell the same pot to different people. God, however, being the ultimate craftsman and artist that he is, one who works in a medium of hearts and minds and spirits and bodies and the like, has never made two pots the same

Anyways, on to the real stuff of this post. So I was at work to day, and I'm not going to tell you what I was doing because that would give it away about 2 sentences earlier than I'd like. The suspense is killing you. No really, it is, you should take some medication for that!

Anyways, on to the real stuff of my post. So I was at work today, and I got to thinking..you know, clay and potter are a good way to express the power of God in our lives, but they don't give a very accurate description of how God brings this about. So, If you know anything about the way I think, you might know that my mind sometimes goes really fast-no, not when I need to make decisions or speak or something, or like do something simple, but when I'm doing math or physics or daydreaming..so I kind of thought up a new analogy for how God forms us, our personalities and talents and gifts.

I would like to suggest that in our lives, God is like a stone mason and we are like stones. Not bricks or tiles or blocks, but real natural stones, like the ones you put on a wall. Wall stones. See, when you make a stone wall, and you get your stone, you first start off with this big, thick, ungainly hunk of rock that looks like it would never look good. So first you have to square up the sides so its kind of a uniform thickness, so you have a starting point, something to work at. So you lie the stone on its back and mark around the edges of the stone so that all your markings are the same height from your workbench. then you chisel all the edges so that the front face of the stone is the same thickness around the outside-roughtly- and more importantly, the edges are all on a plane. But this chiseling is not always easy-sometimes the stone doesn't chip easily, or it doesn't chip at all, and you end up with a wierd looking shape where the stone broke.

The next step in building the wall is to find a spot for the stone. So you try to find the best spot where the stone will fit on its own, but you almost never can find a perfect spot, so you take the stone back and you cut pieces off of it and then you fix it so it fits. Now, you have your finished stone. It now looks like..a big hunk of rock with sharp corners and weird chunks out of it and cut marks on it. Great. So you take it over and put it on the wall and mortar it in, and you keep going, and by and by your wall is finished, and you look, and lo and behold, you have a beautiful stone wall. And you think to yourself 'You know, i knew that shape would just lend itself to making this wall beautiful. The colours of this stone match perfectly with the ones around it, and all its blemishes and imperfections that make it have rough edges give it a beauty I cannot describe easily'

WE are like stones. We start off as just hunks of rock, and we look like we could never make any wall beautiful. But God sizes us up, closes one eye and lines up his thumb, and says "Hm, well its coulor would fit right here, and its shape lends itself to this, and..hmm" and he gets out his chisel and starts to change us. But he doesn't grind us down into perfect little squares and line us up in rows-no he takes our imperfections and the shape that we have, and he finds a spot for us- a little chipping here, a little realignment there. Sometimes he cuts off a big chunk of us because we are no good when we have that extra. But its not always easy! Sometimes we resist-we don't want to chip and and break and be shaped, so we resist his will-even to the point of crumbling in his hands. But even then, God can use the pieces left over for some other spot in the wall. When we are finished, we might not look like much-one stone is all we are, and we just look like a rock. But when we are put amongst all the other stones that God has laboured over, we become a beautiful creation. Being the stones that we are, we can't always see how good we look on that wall..all we know is the chips we have lost and the cutting of the saw. But God sees us, and he sees our beauty, and he says "I knew that was just the spot for you!"