Ah, the smell of Play-Doh. It hits you double-barreled in both nostrils. Memories come flooding back. I roll and shape. I press and I pull. I am making…nothing. Just enjoying working the Doh.

Now I’ve moved up to putty, therapy puddy, to be exact. The kind they give you “for free” when you are rehabbing an ailing digit. But I’ve graduated from rehab; now I am just playing. Just like when I was a kid, except I stop every now and then to admire my “work.” In its course it looks like:

• an alligator
• a snake
• an elephant
• a dragon
• a dragon eating his tail
• a dragon ashamed of himself
• an embryo
• a heart
• a face, very old and wrinkled
• an eagle’s head or
• maybe a turtle

I like the turtle. I set him in his round, plastic therapy putty home. And, as always happens with puddy, he melts slowly into the shape of the container. That never happened with play-Doh. It got hard and crusty, probably because I left off the cover.

As it melts, my turtle is looking suspiciously like a snail. Ah well. Later I will shape it again. Into something completely new. My hands will know what to do. What it’s meant to be I will leave completely up to them and to my imagination.

Do you suppose God is trying to tell me something?

Just shape. Just mold. Just model. But every now and then, take a look at what we are doing together in your hands.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord:  “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.”  So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. ~ Jeremiah 18:1-6

The clay I am in the master’s hands is something new each day. I don’t know what it will be, but He does.