I decided to trust God and believe that I was completed and that I could start pouring out His love to those around me. It was great and the feeling lasted about two days and then I fell back into some old bad habits and I had a picture of me, the jug, being knocked off the table where I had been placed and landing on the floor. My handle broke off and a few cracks appeared on my body.
I mentioned to a friend of mine that I had thought I was past the clay stage and had become a beautiful jug but now felt that the jug was broken and I was back on the potter’s wheel.
She wrote me
the following little note “maybe God is just super gluing your handle onto
Himself and His love”.
I could
see Jesus kneeling down and tenderly picking me, the jug, and my handle
up and gluing it back together again with His love. As He ran His hands over my body the cracks
disappeared and I was whole again.
It is a known
fact that once something has been super glued it will very rarely ever break in
the same place again.
Psalm 145:14 says “The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down.”
A couple of months later the same friend wrote me another note. This is what she said “By the way God would like you to know just how much He likes you. As I am typing this He is giving me a sense of how deeply He cares for you. That He took great care in making you and He is really rather pleased with how you turned out! He also says to remind you that He is a God of awesome compassion”.
How encouraging to receive words like these from our friends. We often feel so worried and stressed that God cannot get through to us so He places His message on someone else’s heart so that they can tell us just how much He cares for us.
Often all we can see are the imperfections, the bumps, the cracks and the areas where we have been super glued together. God in His love is continually healing us and mending us in order that when He fills us up we will not leak.
A person who is
dying of thirst and who comes across a jug holding pure water couldn’t care
less what that jug has gone through or what it looks like because it holds life
giving water that can be poured out.
God says in
Joel that “…I will pour out my
Spirit on all people”1
and then in Romans it says “…God
has poured out His love into our hearts”.2
We, in turn,
need to start pouring this love out to others.
We need to take
the time to be filled up and this is done when we spend time in prayer and
reading the Bible, by worshipping God in song or by just sitting and watching a
beautiful sunset knowing that He has created this world for our enjoyment.
Once we are
filled we need to pour out these blessings into other peoples lives. We have to move and share ourselves with
others otherwise the blessings inside us become stagnant and we become dull and
stale.
Psalm 16:11
says “You have made known to me the
path of life; you will fill me with joy
in your presence…”.Psalm 81:10 says “I am the Lord your God….Open wide your mouth and I will fill it”.
A potter’s mark
is a device used for the purpose of identifying pottery wares.
On an ancient
Greek vase the following mark was found “Exekias made and painted me”.Exekias was an ancient Greek vase painter and potter.
Isn’t that such a beautiful image.
One day when I die I want my tombstone inscription to read “God made and painted
me!”
1. Joel 2:28 (NIV)
2. Romans 5:5 (NIV)
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