Remembrance

                      

                        I remember a few of Jerry's pots.

I remember the pale glaze on the one

    we gave to
Dick Foth.

 
I remember the one we sold to the owner of

     Country
Fair.

 
I remember the cross he made for Urbana Assembly

      in the
seventies.

 
But there are hundreds that I don't recall:

 
All the pots we sold that time in Decatur

       when we
didn't sit down all weekend.

 
That raku pot that Jamie bought—

        I
don't remember that one very well,

            though
I could visit it.

 
The two that the sculpture professor bought—

        I hope
they are still in the special places

            he
bought them for.

 

You remember all your creations, Papa

            And
you don't sell any of them.

In Creative Hands

Tuesday night I made a purse out of loose ends I found around the house. I cut the body out of the legs of black cotton jeans, discarded when I was 40 pounds heavier. The zipper I ripped out of a fanny pack on which “Gold Strike” was embroidered. I don’t know what that phrase means or where it came from, except the back of my closet.

I stiffened the sides with reinforced plastic left over from our old jewelry business sign. The ribbed nylon strap I repurposed from a fleece stadium blanket carrier. I don’t do football. But I do do creativity. I love making new functionality out of useless objects. The purse is just the right size for my wallet, phone, and voice recorder, and the strap is just the right length so the bag is tucked under my arm.

Isn’t that what our creative God does with previously useless pieces of our lives? Those third grade piano lessons? The daydream you had when you were sixteen about piloting an airplane? What about the idea in early adulthood to preach the gospel in the inner city?

Are they really loose ends that God won’t do anything with? Or will God yet use them in unexpected ways? Will he soon sew together previously useless objects into a container that will carry his glory into the world?

Father, you are the master Creator. Help us believe that you will yet mold the useless parts of our lives into patterns that you will fill with your glory. 

Think

Since September, 2005, when we got a bread machine, we’ve enjoyed
baking our own wonderfully fragrant whole wheat bread. They looked just like
store-bought, except where the stirring paddle tore the bottom. Not such a big
deal, really, the slices in the middle of the loaf just had a V-shaped piece
missing, but still.

The process takes two hours and twenty-five minutes. At one
hour and thirty minutes, after the mixing and a few minutes of rising, the stirrer
briefly shapes the loaf. At that point, its work is done.

Last Tuesday, my husband, hearing the eight-second burst of
activity, reached in, lifted the dough, and removed the paddle. What a
brilliant idea! I’d often heard the noise but it never occurred to me to remove
it. The three sixteenths inch shaft leaves a tiny hole. Thinking of that
solution took us three years.

Why do we tolerate minor irritations that could easily be solved
if we’d just stop and think? We usually look for God’s solutions for the bigger
trials, but maybe we let the faucet drip rather than figuring out how to
replace the washer. Or we keep tripping over the table in the hallway rather
than thinking about how to reorganize the furniture.

Maybe you’re completely on top of the irritating details of
your life, but for the rest of us, sometimes we just need to stop and think. God’s
solutions for the small irritants may be staring us in the face, waiting for us
to stop long enough to see them. They may be as obvious as removing the paddle
when its work is done.

Father, help us think. Open our eyes to your solutions, not
just for the big trials, but also for the small annoyances.