IN GOD’S HANDS
“But now, O Lord,
You are our Father;
We are the clay, and You our potter;
And all we are the work of Your hand.”
– Isaiah 64:8
In another life, I studied Art History with a concentration in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, dreaming of becoming an art buyer or auctioneer—thanks to Whit-ley Gilbert and A Different World. While my studies focused on Italy, one of my favorite sculptors was actually a French artist: François-Auguste-René Rodin, the Impressionist master best known for The Thinker.
I loved Rodin’s work—but even more than his sculptures, I was fascinated by how he signed them. Most artists leave a traditional signature. Rodin did something different. He signed his work with his thumbprint.
A fingerprint is profoundly personal—something so unique that no two are alike. It iden-tifies us. It marks us. It tells the world who we are. When God created us, God etched our fingerprints and molded us just as the potter shapes the clay, as described in Jer-emiah 18 and Isaiah 64. God is the potter, and we are the clay—formed in the image of God, Imago Dei. A divine self-portrait, if you will.
We are not God, but we are reflections of God. Not perfect, but perfectly imperfect. And like Rodin, God left God’s signature upon us during the molding—divine imprints, fingerprints pressed into our very being.
Now, molding doesn’t always feel good. In fact, most of the time, it hurts. You might expect it to feel like a soothing massage—but even a good massage hurts a little. It increases circulation, loosens knots of tension, breaks up scar tissue, and moves toxins out of the body so healing can occur.
The same is true of spiritual molding. It may be uncomfortable, even painful, but it is necessary. God continues to work on us because we are works in progress. God re-moves the toxins of this world, heals the wounds we accumulate along the way, and smooths the scars left behind.
God declares that we belong to Him—His creation. And people will know that we are His because they will see God’s fingerprints all over our lives.
PRAYER
Lord, as You continue to mold us into Your image, may Your praise be continually in our mouths.
REFLECTION
Can you think of a season when you realized God was molding you?