In the Hands of the Potter

            When I look back at my life, I wonder how many times that I have been made over.  What I mean is that what I was becoming was not particularly pleasing to God or to myself and I needed desperately to be changed.  I had no idea what that change ought to be, but somehow it showed up and I came to follow another path. 

            When I was just out of high school, I decided to pursue a career in forestry.  I was attracted to it by a supervisor that I had when I worked over the summer for my town.  He was a gracious man who seemed to always understand what I was doing and how I was doing it.  He had a wisdom that was beyond his profession.  It was a great pleasure working for him.  So I went to college to try to become a forester.  I learned dendrology, trigonometry, and spent a long time working in the woods coming to understand the logging industry and how conservation was an absolute necessity in this world.  At some point, I think I understood that this profession was not for me and I lost interest in it.  After I spent another semester trying to come to terms with what I was doing, both the university and I came to understand that I was obviously made for other things than forestry.  I left school, came home and eventually got into the broadcasting business where I had a twenty year career.  In the course of this, I met Rosie, we were married, and went on together.  My marriage changed me.  I came to understand responsibility in a different way.  When we had our children, I took on another role, that of father to kids who needed both of us. 

            After I went through a bankruptcy at a television station where I worked, I was out of work and needed to change again.  I had always been interested in my church, so I called my rector, spoke to the bishop and was enrolled in seminary to become an Episcopal priest.  This was another fortunate change for me.  In my career as a priest, I have had wonderful experiences that have changed my life.  I never would have predicted that it would come out this way, but looking back, it all seems of a piece, a smooth transition from one thing to another. 

            I think of all of this when I read Jeremiah’s account of God telling him to go to the potter’s house because he has something to tell him.  The potter is making and reshaping pots that haven’t worked out the way that he intended in the first place.  God tells Jeremiah that he works in the same way, making and reshaping people and groups when they go astray.  I know that God’s hand has been in my life doing this constantly.  I have been shaped and reshaped by God until this present day.  I also know that God is not finished with me.  What reshaping is in the future, I can’t say, but if it is in the same pattern as the rest of my life, I need have no fear.  It will give me God’s blessing as I have had it up to now.  This is an enormous comfort to me.  It makes all of the pain and strain of the changes that have happened make great sense.  I am in the hands of a gracious God who loves me and has an agenda for my life.  What more can I ask?