The Potter

       While living in West Virginia, we often found ourselves passing a little place called Penn Alps.  It was a restaurant and village.  They had moved a lot of buildings to the land where the restaurant was located and each building would have a craftsman of some sort there making things.  One of them was a potter.  We still have a lot of dishes with his signature on the bottom.  It is amazing to watch the potter at work with a spinning platform and a gob of wet  mud.  Well, it looked like mud, but the potter would get it spinning and slowly mold it into what he was thinking about.  It could be a cup or a bowl or a pitcher.  It was up to the potter to make what he had in mind for each portion of mud.  Isaiah 64:8 says, " 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"  
     Genesis 2:7 reminds us that man was created from the dust of the ground and that God did it.  The physical part of us remains just a combination of elements but what happened then was the breath of God that made each of us a living soul.  No earthly potter can do that but there are some similarities in the work.  A potter has an idea what the object is going to be.  God knows what each of us are and all the working of every facet of our lives.  Psalm 139 describes the things that God does with each and every soul and God knows all of the thoughts even when we get up and sit down and every thought that is in our mind.  That can be a frightening thing.  You and I can be sitting in a church or in a meeting or in a bus and God knows every thought that goes through our mind.  We would think that our thoughts are just mere whims of something that passes through our minds and that they might be totally insignificant.   God however, knows each and every one of them.  There may be times when we look in the mirror and look at the image staring back at us and wonder why God made my nose this or that way or that my eyebrows are missing or I am too short or too tall.  We may even ask, "Why did God make me this way?"  The answer is found in the fact that God is the universal Potter.  He makes everything.  A potter decides which piece is going to be a bread pan to be placed in a hot oven time after time, or if the piece is going to be a beautiful plate that shines in full glory for all the world to see.  The world needs that bread pan just as it does the plate.  The world also needs you and me.  So, rest in the creation of the Lord.  He is indeed our Potter and He never makes a mistake.  Praise God today for His handiwork.