Articles
Broken Pottery
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 life the way we want it and life comes along and shatters us.
We try to pick up the pieces and put our life 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). Lord, make us into the vessel you want us to be . . . even if we must be broken.
Ken Stegall
Woodland Oaks church of Christ
The Woodlands, TX
