Hands In the Clay

The kiln argument happens every term and it is always the same argument, and everybody there would be a little sorry if it stopped.

It is about whether it should be packed tight or loose. There are two camps. Neither camp has ever moved an inch and both of them have anecdotes, and the tutor, who has been doing this for twenty-six years and knows the answer, has learned to let it run because it is good for the room.

Tuesday nights. Six of them. A radio, a bag of clay, a shelf of last week's work going leathery under plastic, and the particular smell of a room where water and dust have been mixed for years.

She is at the far wheel. She has been coming since before the tutor got the new kiln, which is nine years, and she is easily the best of them, and if you told her that she would say something modest and mean it.

Her hands know exactly what they are doing. That is a real thing and it is not nothing. Nine years of Tuesdays have given her hands a competence her chest has never once shared.

Because the whole time her hands are steady, she is doing the other thing. She is generating. Working up enough of something, out of herself, to sit in that room and be at ease, and she has been doing it for so long that she has come to think of it as a personality trait she is missing rather than a job she has been given.

Sit down at the wheel next to me a minute, and let me say the sentence that matters most before anything else. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not tonight, not one day, not as a braver version of yourself. I will not guess what it is and I will not offer you a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a woman who never tells another living person is a whole woman and a whole reader of this site.

Confidence, in Proverbs, is a Person

There is a line in Proverbs that everybody reads as encouragement and that is actually a change of subject.

For the LORD shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot from being taken.Proverbs 3:26

Read it as a sentence with a subject and an object, because that is what it is.

It does not say the Lord will help you feel confident. It does not say He will grow your confidence, or bless your confidence, or reward it. It says the Lord shall be your confidence.

He is not a support for the thing. He is the thing.

Which means all those Tuesdays you have spent trying to manufacture a feeling out of your own chest were spent trying to produce something that was never yours to produce. Not because you were doing it wrong. Because it was already being supplied, from outside you, by Somebody who does not run low at half past eight in the evening.

You have confidence and it is a Person rather than a mood, and you were never the factory. I am not offering you a nice thought. The written word makes God Himself the noun in that sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman with her hands in the clay.

And keep thy foot from being taken

The second half of that verse is the practical half and it does something quiet and lovely.

Keep thy foot from being taken. That is snare language. A snare is a thing hidden in the ground that catches a walking foot, and the whole nature of a snare is that you do not see it and you cannot plan around it and you find out afterward.

That is precisely what a room does to you. You walk in fine. Twenty minutes later something has caught, and you could not have told anybody in advance which sentence it would be.

He does not promise there are no snares in that studio. He promises to be the one keeping your foot, which is a job done by somebody walking with you rather than by you looking harder at the ground.

You are being kept by Someone walking beside you, and you were never going to be able to watch for it all yourself. Scripture says He keeps our going out and our coming in, and it is His Spirit, not your vigilance, who does the keeping in a room on a Tuesday evening.