Growing Pains & the Potter’s Hands.
Talking to my grandfather this week, he asked if I was enjoying the summer. I said I was, but it’s had a lot of “growing pains.”
Then I jokingly added that I think this whole year has been a growing pain.
But it’s kind of true. Spring semester, I hit the sophomore slump, and my grades fell and I was in a mini-depression. I was frustrated with myself, and with school — I didn’t know which way was up.
Then I moved to Birmingham for the summer and had to work a big girl job. You know, sitting at a desk 9 to 5 and paying rent. Locking my keys in my car, and breaking my computer. Learning to go to work and do laundry and clean and be responsible. Feeling like a little kid wearing grown-up shoes.
Add to all that a feeling of displacement. Jackson, home, Birmingham, home, Jackson. This age is so unsettling. Constant transition means there’s no “home,” but only shuffling from place to place, wondering what the future holds. Hoping the decisions you’re making will get you a better job than McDonalds when you graduate.
Then you’ve got all the “bones in your closet” from high school. All that insecurity I ignored in my early teenage years has been a struggle to dig up and get out of my system. Sometimes things like that are so deeply engrained into your mind and personality that working through them is a slow, sometimes painful process.
Yet the best part of it all is that growing pains mean growth. It’s painful, but throughout every up and down I’ve faced this year, I see God’s hand molding and shaping me into the woman he wants me to be. With every insecurity or difficulty that surfaces, God starts crushing the pieces of me that don’t fit what he wants for me and molding them into His image. He’s making me into a vessel to be used for His glory, slowly but surely.
The Lord gave another message to Jeremiah. He said,
“Go down to the potter’s shop, and I will speak to you there.”
So I did as he told me and found the potter working at his wheel. 4 But the jar he was making did not turn out as he had hoped, so he crushed it into a lump of clay again and started over.
Then the Lord gave me this message: “O Israel, can I not do to you as this potter has done to his clay? As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.”
-Jeremiah 18
