I recently reflected on an experience in which a friend led me through a ritual for surrendering burdens. I was surprised to find that the burdens weighing on me most heavily had little to do with the roles and responsibilities that I was carrying. What felt crushing was the weight of all my nots.
There are two levels at which we can experience the burden of not-ness. One level concerns the activities that make up our days—all the worthy things we did not do because we prioritized other worthy things. Many of us drag through the world an ever-growing list of vitally important tasks for which we haven’t found or made the time. (See my previous entry “For Somewhere and For Someone” for reflections on this.)
But some of us are haunted by a deeper awareness. There is a set of personal traits or experiences that, if we possessed them, would surely serve some people better. There are gifts that are essential to addressing urgent needs in the church and world, and yet hard as we try to cultivate these gifts, we struggle to achieve even mediocrity. The heaviest thing many of us carry through the world is the awareness of what we are not and do not know how to be.
A great deal of my own life, I’ve begun to suspect, has been in spent in desperate scrapping to overcome all the failures that seem clearly implied by the incorrigible, obstinate not-ness of my base shape.
But recently in prayer I found myself thinking of words spoken on God’s behalf by the prophet Isaiah: “Doom to the one who argues with the potter, as if he were just another clay pot! Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?” (Isaiah 45:9).
If I am the clay and God is the Potter, it occurs to me that some portion of my not-ness is by design. This is not a mistake or a failure; a pot simply cannot take every shape at once. Its particular shape is thoughtfully chosen to correspond with its purpose. But more than that, even the choice of the raw materials themselves has implications for the array of possible outcomes.
Picture a lump of raw materials in the hands of an artisan. These materials, whatever they may be, already have a solid “it-ness” that belongs to their elemental composition. The raw material may take a variety of shapes under the hands of the artisan. But not an infinite variety. A good artisan chooses their medium, their raw material, in a manner appropriate to the range of functions that they seek. No one pursues ceramics hoping to pave roads. Or pulls out ingredients for cement when they need a vessel for carrying water long distances. Glass is ideal for many purposes. But no one works with it when their purpose is making toys for toddlers.
We are each born, not as amorphous vapor, but as something. There is a solid it-ness, a specificity, to the stuff of which we are each made. Over our lives, God will shape and refine this material—if we allow God to do so. Impurities will be removed, strengthening the materials. In different chapters of our lives, the materials may be re-formed to serve a variety of new functions. But there will also always be shapes that any given material will not take naturally because they belong to materials with a very different composition.
The nose smells. It will never hear well, no matter how it tries. As the apostle Paul once observed to the Christians in Corinth (1 Corinthians 12), this limitation is not a failure of the nose. It is merely an indication that the nose belongs forever in relationship with the body. It was made to serve a particular function within a larger whole.
At some fundamental level, our not-ness is not a failure. It is a design-feature of a part that belongs with a greater whole. To recognize that a gift or quality is essential to God’s story is not to say that it should be our own to possess. The shape of our personal calling will nearly always be tied to the fundamental properties and ranges of the raw material that God has given us as a birth—or a re-birth—gift.
If all this is true, our not-ness should not be a source of guilt or shame or endless striving. It is good. The awareness of it is good. It is part of the humility that is proper to finite creatures. This very not-ness is part of what distinguishes us from God, who contains within God’s self all beautiful infinities. Instead of prompting shame or striving, awareness of our not-ness can become an occasion to worship and reminder to honor other pots who are utterly essential in their own unique ways as expressions of God’s infinite wisdom and as vessels of God’s infinite grace.
A Prayer: Great Potter, thank you for what I am. Thank you for what others are that I am not. Thank you for your purpose that is reflected in my design. Thank you for that of you that is a stranger to me but has been revealed to me in my neighbor.
