Still On the Wheel

Isaiah 64:8 -A Daughter's Story in Clay, Root and Wind. 

I am not finished. Not even close. And Isaiah 64:8 tells me that’s okay. “We are the clay, and you are our Potter.” It took me years to stop seeing that as failure. The world taught me I had to be polished, complete, pure. But Jehovah, in his quiet mercy, showed me instead that being shaped—pressed, stretched, spun—was the evidence that I belonged to Jehovah. My life has not been gentle. The hands that first held me also harmed me. I was molded by trauma long before I ever heard of love. But Jehovah did not discard me. Jehovah placed me on his wheel, not to erase who I was, but to reveal what could still be formed.

Clay isn’t easy. It needs pressure and patience. It cracks. It resists. Sometimes, it breaks and must be reworked. That’s me. That’s been me a thousand times. I’ve watched parts of myself fall away like clay too dry to hold. But still, Jehovah kneads me back together, never giving up on the vessel I’m meant to become. The ancestors whisper that this is the way of all living things. “The earth is not just our environment. It is our life. It is who we are.” —John Trudell (Lakota). I hear that, and I know: the same dust that makes clay also makes blood, breath, and memory.

I am mixed-blood—red earth and pale winter bone. I carry songs I don’t fully remember and languages that live only in my dreams. Yet Jehovah sees none of that as confusion. To him, I am not a mistake of ancestry. I am a weaving. “We are all the work of your hand,” the verse says. I imagine Jehovah's hands like river-worn stone—firm, but never cruel. He shapes me with cedar smoke in the air and the hush of soft moss underfoot. When I doubt myself, when I feel too fractured to be useful, I remember Jeremiah 18:4—“But the vessel that the potter was making of the clay was spoiled in his hand. So the potter reworked it into another vessel, just as he saw fit to make.” Even spoiled clay can become sacred again.

The natural world understands this far better than we do. Trees don’t rush their rings. Rivers don’t question their winding. The land teaches that beauty comes in layers—some of them painful. “The Great Spirit is in all things: He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the earth is our Mother.” —Geronimo (Apache). That balance—of spirit above and soil below—is what keeps me grounded when I feel unworthy. Jehovah is not only my Creator; Jehovah is my Father. And he knows my story, the way the hawk knows wind, the way the stone knows rain.

I used to think the shaping had to end for me to be accepted. That I had to be a finished jar—smooth, symmetrical, uncracked. But I now see that the process itself is proof of His love. “He will carry out His work on the earth, completely and quickly,” says Romans 9:28. But Jehovah also carries it out slowly in me—with seasons, setbacks, and sacred starts. And the longer I live, the more I see that being molded until death is not a burden—it’s a blessing. A mark that Jehovah is still with me. Still forming something I cannot yet fully see.

So I let Jehovah shape me—with the roots of my people, the songs of the birds outside my window, the ache of old wounds, and the warmth of new hope. I let Jehovah shape me through scripture and soil, prayer and persistence. Because this clay may not be complete, but it is his. And that is enough.