beauty out of dust...

I don’t do silence well… one of the many reasons why I typically have music playing. And as much as I love music, I love NEW music even more… where the lyrics still seem profound and inspiring because they haven’t been overplayed yet. Currently one of my new faves is “Beautiful Things” by Gungor- the tagline of the chorus simply states: You make beautiful things out of the dust, You make beautiful things out of us.

I love this. Probably because it echoes what I’ve already been learning lately anyways as I go through Genesis… there’s so much power in realizing the purpose and intentionality behind all of God’s creation. Including me. Including you. He’s constantly at work behind the scenes making beauty from the dirt and mess.

When we read how God made man in Genesis 2, it says that God formed man out of the dust of the ground. The Hebrew word for “formed” is typically used to describe what a potter does when creating and shaping a clay vessel. In college I had a powerful visual of what this means when an actual potter came to chapel to demonstrate the process for us. He began spinning and forming a giant container of some sort- it was huge and magnificent. Then halfway through chapel the thing toppled over. Everyone gasped, like a massive tragedy had just occurred, embarrassed for this poor potter whose work of art was just ruined before our eyes. But the potter just kept on working and slowly an even greater creation emerged from the clay. The final product was absolutely beautiful and something we never could have guessed from what he first started with.

He knew what he was doing all along. He had the final piece in mind the whole time he was working, even when we all thought something unexpected had destroyed his work. It’s such a tangible display of our relationship with God…

--  Sometimes he has a tender, gentle touch &

sometimes he has to apply pressure to shape us how he wants
--  Sometimes we are being built up tall and strong &

sometimes we’re allowed to collapse into a seeming mess
--  Sometimes he is smoothing areas out &

sometimes he is scraping designs into us to leave his mark

All the while, though, His hand is on us and He is standing beside us shaping us into the beautiful vessel that He imagined when he first breathed his breath of life into us. That’s what God does- He makes beautiful things out of dust. We are dust. We are being made into something that can only be explained by the goodness and grace of God.

May we not resist the potter’s touch, but rather trust what He has in store for us… may we believe that we are a vessel that displays God’s beauty… "You, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand." ~isaiah 64:8