Jars
We all live in jars. You know. Our lives, our bodies are just jars.
We start as a kid, just a baby sitting up on the floor deciding that
our blanket and teddy bear are important to us. And the jar begins to
form around us. We make choices, good and bad as we grow up and the
clay walls of our jar form higher. By the time we are “grown” our jar
is complete, a reflection of ourselves and fired to be firm and whole.
This jar is us. This jar is our lives. We’re just a tiny human form living in the jar, like the Indian in the Cupboard, smaller than life inside a pottery shell. Just like the aliens that create an exoskeleton of advanced substances and hide within, usually weak and slimy compared to the outside.
At some point though, life gets a bit rough or tough. Life throws a few curve-balls, the s*** hits the fan, we get hurt, we become stressed, we are under assault from some force or another or as the saying goes, life happens. And the problem with that when you live in a jar is that things tend to get broken.
See, my jar is made of many different things. It’s made of God, family and friends, of music and the “pursuit of beauty”, of experiences, work, school and of anything that can be added to the various aspects of “me”. And there came a time when life and my actions combined, caused my jar to crack.
This pottery jar cracked and the handle fell off. See, I stand in the center of this jar and the top is well over my head. I have to contort and jimmy this handle back into place. In the process of doing that, I cracked a big junk off. Suddenly this piece of my jar with all my "God issues" and struggles is lying on the ground.
Well, now I’m trying to hold this piece of my jar where it belongs and now I can’t reach the handle where it fell off again. While trying to get these things back in line, I knock another piece off and suddenly my music-life is shattered all around me. I turn to freak-out about this and my family piece falls off, hitting the ground with a teeth jarring thud. Then life decides to hit me a few more times just when I’m just trying to put my jar back together.
School gets serious, work gets stressful, I don’t have time to sleep, I don’t have money for expenses, and everywhere I go, people try to knock you down rather than lend you a hand. The more you try the less you get and it seems that even though I put more work in, the profit margin is still pathetic. The end result is me, tiny-little-ol’-me in my life-jar trying to stretch myself to touch all the walls, on all sides of a circular pot. I try to hold all ten or twenty pieces of myself in place, in the shape of my jar. Even when I get one glued back in place, another falls off or the paint starts to chip. I end up looking like a circus act trying to juggle and balance everything at once inside my jar.
As I try to hold these pieces in the proper jar shape, I realize they don’t fit right anymore. They no longer fit together because they’ve been grating on each other and the edges are worn smooth here and there and even with glue, my life, my jar won’t fit back together right. No matter what I do or how I stretch to fix it, my jar will not be whole again.
I can’t hold it together. I can’t make it work. I can’t fix it. I can’t do it.
So I’m standing there, feet spread apart to balance myself, arms outstretched to hold the precarious slabs of my pottery life in place, and I begin to cry. See, now that I know I can’t do this forever and don’t even want to do it I have to wonder if I should just let go. But if I do that, everyone will see my jar fall. Everyone will know I don’t have it all together. Even at my age. Everyone else with their jars, will see mine crumble and fall. So I cry as I’m torn between wanting to let go and be done with it, and the pull of an invisible need to hold on to everything even tighter.
As I cry, standing there like the Vitruvian Man, burdened and weary... I hear Him. He’s right next to me and even though I’m stressed and about to shatter under the weight of my jar, His presences is cool and calming.
“Shaina, you can let go you know.”
“How? Everything will crash and be beyond repair!”
“Not if you trust me.”
“You’ll catch everything?”
“I’ll take care of everything.”
“That’s not the same as catching it all...”
“No. It’s not.”
“I can’t let go then. It’ll just be more chaos and mess to clean up.”
“What if we go about it another way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well instead of letting go, what if we fill your jar up?”
“Fill it? With what? It’s full of cracks and holes! The contents will be spilled!”
“Exactly.”
“WHAT?”
“Shaina, what if we filled up your life jar with love?”
“What are you on, God?”
“Shaina, I’m serious.”
“Well, do you remember who you’re talking to??”
“I always know.”
“Well then, why would I fill my jar with love, especially if it’s just gonna spill out??”
“Because then what people will see is a life jar destroyed, shattered and falling apart because of love.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t be so thick, Shaina. Love. My love filling your jar will change you in ways you’ve never imagined. You won’t believe the life I have for you when you are living in a jar of My love. You will be swimming in it. All those cracks in the jar? Those different pieces of you? They will all be soaked in it, as it pours out through the flaws in your jar. It’ll have nowhere else to go. It will pour out of your life like rain water and it won’t end.
"I’ll keep you so saturated in My love, everyone around you will get their feet wet in the overflow. And they won’t see a broken jar. They will see a jar bursting with Me. They will see the pieces, sure. They’ll see the imperfections, yes. But they will see you floating in Me. They will see love. They will see a vulnerable, precarious jar just waiting to explode with My love. What a sight that explosion will be! You know how people enjoy watching explosions. Everyone wants to see it. But I’ll be the reason. I just need your jar. I need you. And yes. I’ll destroy you in the process. But it’ll be worth it. You have to accept that this jar will break though. You won’t be able to hold it together. You’ll have to let go, Shaina.”
“You’re saying all that will happen if I let go? If I let my jar be filled with you, you’ll take care of the jar and me? That you’ll use me?”
My arms tremble under the weight of the jar these days. I’m sure I’m not the only one trying to hold it together and live life when God gets in the way. You know what I’m talking about. That moment when God gets in your grill and says you need to change or be vulnerable or naked. He has an annoying way of poking into places that are a bit touchy or sensitive. See our lives are fragile and pretty small. But he can see EVERY human jar stretching before and after time. A stretch of white as far as He can see, with every human’s jar lined up and down like a military cemetery and we’re all breaking and crumbling in and around each other. None of us have whole jars and we’re all just trying to hold it together, no matter our age or status.
The difference is his love inside our jars. His love can heal, fix, sustain, erode, destroy, steadily fill, overflow, and even explode every life. All he has to do is pour into your jar. But for some reason we resist. Imagine, instead of struggling to hold your jar together, you let go and he turns your jar into a hot tub for you to soak in. Or he uses it to teach you to swim. Or maybe flood you out of your jar for a while. Or who knows what, but doesn’t the idea of being surrounded in his love tempt you? Just a little bit?
9/2012
This jar is us. This jar is our lives. We’re just a tiny human form living in the jar, like the Indian in the Cupboard, smaller than life inside a pottery shell. Just like the aliens that create an exoskeleton of advanced substances and hide within, usually weak and slimy compared to the outside.
At some point though, life gets a bit rough or tough. Life throws a few curve-balls, the s*** hits the fan, we get hurt, we become stressed, we are under assault from some force or another or as the saying goes, life happens. And the problem with that when you live in a jar is that things tend to get broken.
See, my jar is made of many different things. It’s made of God, family and friends, of music and the “pursuit of beauty”, of experiences, work, school and of anything that can be added to the various aspects of “me”. And there came a time when life and my actions combined, caused my jar to crack.
This pottery jar cracked and the handle fell off. See, I stand in the center of this jar and the top is well over my head. I have to contort and jimmy this handle back into place. In the process of doing that, I cracked a big junk off. Suddenly this piece of my jar with all my "God issues" and struggles is lying on the ground.
Well, now I’m trying to hold this piece of my jar where it belongs and now I can’t reach the handle where it fell off again. While trying to get these things back in line, I knock another piece off and suddenly my music-life is shattered all around me. I turn to freak-out about this and my family piece falls off, hitting the ground with a teeth jarring thud. Then life decides to hit me a few more times just when I’m just trying to put my jar back together.
School gets serious, work gets stressful, I don’t have time to sleep, I don’t have money for expenses, and everywhere I go, people try to knock you down rather than lend you a hand. The more you try the less you get and it seems that even though I put more work in, the profit margin is still pathetic. The end result is me, tiny-little-ol’-me in my life-jar trying to stretch myself to touch all the walls, on all sides of a circular pot. I try to hold all ten or twenty pieces of myself in place, in the shape of my jar. Even when I get one glued back in place, another falls off or the paint starts to chip. I end up looking like a circus act trying to juggle and balance everything at once inside my jar.
As I try to hold these pieces in the proper jar shape, I realize they don’t fit right anymore. They no longer fit together because they’ve been grating on each other and the edges are worn smooth here and there and even with glue, my life, my jar won’t fit back together right. No matter what I do or how I stretch to fix it, my jar will not be whole again.
I can’t hold it together. I can’t make it work. I can’t fix it. I can’t do it.
So I’m standing there, feet spread apart to balance myself, arms outstretched to hold the precarious slabs of my pottery life in place, and I begin to cry. See, now that I know I can’t do this forever and don’t even want to do it I have to wonder if I should just let go. But if I do that, everyone will see my jar fall. Everyone will know I don’t have it all together. Even at my age. Everyone else with their jars, will see mine crumble and fall. So I cry as I’m torn between wanting to let go and be done with it, and the pull of an invisible need to hold on to everything even tighter.
As I cry, standing there like the Vitruvian Man, burdened and weary... I hear Him. He’s right next to me and even though I’m stressed and about to shatter under the weight of my jar, His presences is cool and calming.
“Shaina, you can let go you know.”
“How? Everything will crash and be beyond repair!”
“Not if you trust me.”
“You’ll catch everything?”
“I’ll take care of everything.”
“That’s not the same as catching it all...”
“No. It’s not.”
“I can’t let go then. It’ll just be more chaos and mess to clean up.”
“What if we go about it another way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well instead of letting go, what if we fill your jar up?”
“Fill it? With what? It’s full of cracks and holes! The contents will be spilled!”
“Exactly.”
“WHAT?”
“Shaina, what if we filled up your life jar with love?”
“What are you on, God?”
“Shaina, I’m serious.”
“Well, do you remember who you’re talking to??”
“I always know.”
“Well then, why would I fill my jar with love, especially if it’s just gonna spill out??”
“Because then what people will see is a life jar destroyed, shattered and falling apart because of love.”
“Come again?”
“Don’t be so thick, Shaina. Love. My love filling your jar will change you in ways you’ve never imagined. You won’t believe the life I have for you when you are living in a jar of My love. You will be swimming in it. All those cracks in the jar? Those different pieces of you? They will all be soaked in it, as it pours out through the flaws in your jar. It’ll have nowhere else to go. It will pour out of your life like rain water and it won’t end.
"I’ll keep you so saturated in My love, everyone around you will get their feet wet in the overflow. And they won’t see a broken jar. They will see a jar bursting with Me. They will see the pieces, sure. They’ll see the imperfections, yes. But they will see you floating in Me. They will see love. They will see a vulnerable, precarious jar just waiting to explode with My love. What a sight that explosion will be! You know how people enjoy watching explosions. Everyone wants to see it. But I’ll be the reason. I just need your jar. I need you. And yes. I’ll destroy you in the process. But it’ll be worth it. You have to accept that this jar will break though. You won’t be able to hold it together. You’ll have to let go, Shaina.”
“You’re saying all that will happen if I let go? If I let my jar be filled with you, you’ll take care of the jar and me? That you’ll use me?”
My arms tremble under the weight of the jar these days. I’m sure I’m not the only one trying to hold it together and live life when God gets in the way. You know what I’m talking about. That moment when God gets in your grill and says you need to change or be vulnerable or naked. He has an annoying way of poking into places that are a bit touchy or sensitive. See our lives are fragile and pretty small. But he can see EVERY human jar stretching before and after time. A stretch of white as far as He can see, with every human’s jar lined up and down like a military cemetery and we’re all breaking and crumbling in and around each other. None of us have whole jars and we’re all just trying to hold it together, no matter our age or status.
The difference is his love inside our jars. His love can heal, fix, sustain, erode, destroy, steadily fill, overflow, and even explode every life. All he has to do is pour into your jar. But for some reason we resist. Imagine, instead of struggling to hold your jar together, you let go and he turns your jar into a hot tub for you to soak in. Or he uses it to teach you to swim. Or maybe flood you out of your jar for a while. Or who knows what, but doesn’t the idea of being surrounded in his love tempt you? Just a little bit?
9/2012
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