Nazi concentration camps

Broken Pottery

I've only interacted a few times with Ken Stegall, but I love him. Do you know why? He makes me
think. Think with me as Ken writes about a recent experience:

I was watching a fascinating documentary recently which interviewed four Jewish men who had suffered
and survived four years in a Nazi concentration camp.

A number of things struck me as I listened to all four of them tell about their experiences. One of
them was a lack of bitterness. They had been given the opportunity to revisit the site of their
horrific experience. This visit provided the bulk of footage for the documentary. They walked
around the site and pointed out places where certain things had happened. You can imagine the
emotion as one of them pointed to an exact spot where his mother and sister had stood waving - just
before they were put on a train headed for the gas chambers.

But almost as fascinating were the comments from each man's wife and/or children. One of the wives'
comments stuck with me. She said, "He is like a piece of pottery that was broken and glued back
together."

That thought keeps returning to my mind. My first reaction was, maybe we're all like that to some
degree. We try to mold our lives the way we want them, and life comes along and shatters us. We
try to pick up the pieces and put our lives back together. Maybe we lost some pieces in the process
and had to find something different to fill in the holes. Maybe we feel like we don't look as good
as we did before.

Or maybe . . . we never did look as good as we thought we did and God needed us to know that so He
could, not just glue the pieces back together, but remake us - into a vessel that He could use.

God sent Jeremiah to the potter's house where he watched the potter reshaping a marred pot: "... so
the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as it seemed best to him" (Jeremiah 18:4).

The truth is: all of our "pots" are broken because we all struggle with sin (Romans 3:23).

But God still loves us and wants to remake us into something beautiful: a recreation in the likeness
of Jesus, His Son (Ephesians 2:8-10; Galatians 4:19).

In order to accomplish this metamorphosis, God gave His Son to die on the cross for our sins, so
that we can be forgiven, receive the gift of His Spirit, and enjoy the hope of eternal life with Him
in heaven.

God will save and remake those who will place their faith and trust in Jesus (Acts 16:30-31), turn
from their sins in repentance (Acts 17:30-31), confess Jesus before men (Romans 10:9-10), and are
baptized (immersed) into Christ for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38). He will continue to
transform us into the likeness of His Son as we walk in the light of His Word (1 John 1:7).

Something beautiful, something good
All my confusion He understood
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife But he made something beautiful of my life.
-- Songwriters: Guy Chambers and Robert Peter Williams

Ken's prayer is my own; I hope it's yours, too. Lord, make us into the vessel you want us to be . .
. even if we must be broken.

Won't YOU place yourself in the hands of the Wonderful Potter and entrust your life to Him through
your trusting obedience?

-- David A. Sargent

* "Broken Pottery" by Ken Stegall.