AND CLAY LAUGHED

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness;
but unto us which are saved it’s the power of God.
(1Corinthians 1:18)

As I read these words this morning, something within me hurts. It is hard for my mind to grasp the concept of someone willing to be fully destroyed. All because they won't step out of a spirit of independence...because they will not acknowledge a need for something greater than themselves....because way back, in a garden, at a tree, a whisperer already set toward enmity with God laid the groundwork in man's mind to question God's authority, God's character, and God's right to lay the ground rules ... to define righteousness, a righteousness reflecting His own holiness.

I have within my mind a picture so vivid, so audacious, so frightening, that I can hardly bear to describe it.

A man stands, made of clay, formed by Heaven's Master Potter with His very own hands; and though beautiful in design, the man would be nothing but an inanimate lump of clay were it not for the very breath of God filling his divinely fashioned lungs. He stands there, in front of God, beholding God's costly, bloodied provision, and he laughs. Out loud. Shaking his head, and laughing ... at his only hope.

Something in me shutters. As never before, at this moment when the picture unfolds so vividly, I stand in awe of Grace, in awe that the ‘shaking head’ doesn't immediately return to that lifeless lump of clay. I stand in awe that it continues to hold God's heart, knowing it captured God's love before a single atom found substance. The staggering power of God's love ... to hold back, to hope, to continue to hold out choice.


No wonder God set a safeguard for our souls, at the very beginning, embedded deeply within our Edenic clay. Words spoken over us at the moment of our own fashioning: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your spirit, with all your strength. I can't help but see them as the very breath that winged from God into the nostrils of man, instilling life. Winged into me. And with the utterance, the switch to loving God set to the 'on' position.

What incredible grief must strike the heart of God, continuously, when loved one after loved one, with little hesitation, reaches up and turns the switch to 'off.'

Moreover, I'm left asking a question, of myself. How often, when God looks upon my heart, does He recognize me going about my day, steeped in my own way, shaking my head in wonderment over what God could possibly be been thinking? And I shutter.



Even now, LORD, I hear Your grief-filled words speak to the hidden waywardness of my heart: “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are My ways your ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
I can only confess, with a brokenness of my own, what You already know. Though my tongue confesses You are God, all to readily I find myself thinking Your ways little more than foolishness in light of the world in which I live. In 'light' of the world .... Oh, Father, You are the only light. The foolishness of the world, of my own ways, only darkness. Please forgive the 'secret' attitude of my heart, so easily reflected in so many of my choices, of my thoughts, of my actions .... of my words. Continue to mold this clay, fashioning it with Your loving hands, until it truly reflects the image of You in all my ways.



© DeAnna Brooks
19 August 2005