I have spent the better part of the morning trying to get my lawn under control. My riding mower blades quit turning two weeks ago and the push mower wouldn’t start. I got the push mower going Wednesday and mowed the front lawn which wasn’t too bad, but the backyard is angry and hard to deal with, like some people I’ve met. I got out there early to try and beat the heat and ended up dealing with the damp, so my mower keeps clogging up and quitting. It’s whining.
As I was sitting here thinking about the whiny lawnmower not wanting to work, I was hit with the irony that I am very much like that whiny lawnmower. I want the effect of a neat yard, but I don’t want to have to put in the work required to make it, so I whine and complain and throw metaphorical (okay sometimes literal) tantrums.
I often complain about the tools I have to work with, which were free by the way, because they don’t work to the optimum level and often need tweaking before I can even start work. Then I think about God using us, broken vessels, to do His Work. He has to clean us up and put us back together before He can even use us. Then he has to deal with constant upkeep. It’s a wonder that he doesn’t just throw us on the trash heap and move on to something new.
I don’t really have a choice about the tools I use because I can’t afford new, and the tools I do have were gracious gifts from other people. God had a choice. He could have written us off and just moved on, but he chooses to work with broken vessels, no matter how much they complain about it.
I am only the clay, so who am I to complain to the maker, the potter, about what he does with me: “But now, O Lord, thou are our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand” (Isaiah 64:8). God is using us to do His will even though sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. He works with broken vessels so that His power is shown: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). We should be thankful that God uses us at all. He loves us so much that he not only uses us, but He is working toward making us a whole, one broken piece at a time.
In the meantime, I’ll try to work on the complaining bit…