Crushed, Started Over

The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah. He said, “Go down to the potter’s shop, and I will speak to you there.”  So I did as he told me and found the potter working at his wheel.  But the jar he was making did not turn out as he had hoped, so he crushed it into a lump of clay again and started over.

~Jeremiah 18:1-4

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Dear Kate,

If the "fruit of the Spirit" is "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control," then the human default must be hateful, disagreeable, disloyal, dishonest, thoughtless, unpeaceable, belligerent, violent, intolerant, irritable, unreliable, unscrupulous, worried, and, first and finally, selfish.

So what the Spirit could do, or more like what we could be in the Spirit, is a picture as hopeful as it is devastating.

But how true is this picture of human default?  Somewhat, we must admit; to what extend, debatable.  The least we need to accept is that this is the canvas on which we paint.

Yet the metaphor breaks down early and easily: we don't paint over hate to arrive at love, we can't give a varnish of benevolence to conceal malevolence, we couldn't water-proof our soul against a flood of human evil from within, any minute ready to burst out to meet that from without.  Such practical, working knowledge about ourselves and others we must put to use in life, even as we intend to tread like angels, lest we forget we are rarely angels, even less likely treading lightly in any of our human dealing.

The metaphor of crushed clay being worked over is a better one to speak about who we are, a work in progress, everything about us mixed in to reshape our mixed-ups into possibly something good.

What is shaping us then?  Whose hands?

Life events occurring naturally, natural as human progress?  Human progress is never natural; we are all dying, many of us unnaturally.  We must choose life, say No to death, in every choice we make.  Am I the potter of my own destiny then?  Can a lump of crushed clay remake itself?  And if not, am I not conceding to whatever force most powerful to lay claim on shaping me?  Even if the "most powerful" hands are those of a most benevolent God, am I not somehow giving up on being human in the name of becoming a better person?

These are some of the reflections I had after binging through "Breaking Bad," and now following the journey of the even better spin-off "Better Call Saul."

Yours, Alex