Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time (August 2, 2018): Are you soft clay in God's hands?

What in your life has turned out badly? Think of something that started out well — it looked very promising for a while — but it ended in failure. God says in today’s first reading that this is only clay. He can reshape it into something beautiful and useful. It’s not disastrous.

Failure does not mean that there’s no hope of success. The failure to be holy does not mean that we’re hopelessly sinful. The end of a relationship or job or project or plan does not indicate that God is finished with it.

Our sins and failures and bad endings are tossed away like the junk that was collected in the dragnet of today’s Gospel reading. The impurities in our clay have contributed to the warping of our spirits and the distortions or our perceptions, but if we ask God to purify us, the impurities are pulled out by his careful fingers, no faster than we can handle it, and he throws them aside.

And if our new pot still turns out misshapen, God refines us to a greater degree. If you’ve been feeling like you’re under fire, it’s probably the fires of purification. Believe it or not, you’re becoming holier. As long as you want to become a beautiful vessel of God’s love, the heat of your trials is not destroying you; it’s purifying you.

We can help God form a wonderful, new pot by giving him no resistance. Our shape is perfected more easily if we let him spin us on his potter’s wheel instead of being hard and firm in wanting to decide how and when our lives should change.

Furthermore, as we apply this to what Jesus said about the Godly scribe, we discover that the best pot is produced when we let him combine our old material with new clay and fresh water and his own coloring dyes and whatever else he wants to add into it.

God never lets anything go to waste. Many years ago, I thought I’d messed up God’s plans for my life by taking a job that was not totally in keeping with his values. I quit after my conscience bothered me for several months, and I regretted that I had misspent so much time. However, God later gave me the opportunity to use the skills I had learned in doing that job, now using them for the work of his kingdom. In fact, as I let him shape my application of these skills, their usefulness for his plans has continued to increase over the years.

When we allow God to make us anew according to his desires, trusting in his expert shaping skills, giving him everything we’ve done in the past — the good and the bad — and when we invite him to add into our lives whatever he chooses, everything that had previously been a failure becomes a lovely earthen vessel that holds many treasures.

You’ll know it’s happened when what’s inside your pot blesses others. God does not reshape us only for our own benefit. As he works with our clay, he’s thinking of how he can build a pot that will benefit the whole Church as well as the world in which we live. We are that important! Being pliable clay in God’s hands is that valuable!