This was twice as hot and I just knew I would suffocate. I begged. I pleaded. I screamed. I cried. I was convinced I would never make it. I was ready to give up. Just then the door opened and he took me out and again placed me on the shelf, where I cooled and waited ——- and waited, wondering what’s he going to do to me next? An hour later he handed me a mirror and said “Look at yourself.” And I did. I said, ‘That’s not me; that couldn’t be me. It is beautiful. I am beautiful!” Quietly he spoke: “I want you to remember, then,” he said, “I know it hurt to be rolled and pounded and patted, but had I just left you alone, you’d have dried up.I know it made you dizzy to spin around on the wheel, but if I had stopped, you would have crumbled.I know it hurt and it was hot and disagreeable in the oven, but if I hadn’t put you there, you would have cracked. I know the fumes were bad when I brushed and painted you all over, but if I hadn’t done that, you never would have hardened. You would not have had any color in your life. If I hadn’t put you back in that second oven, you wouldn’t have survived for long because the hardness would not have held. Now you are a finished product. Now you are what I had in mind when I first began with you. “The moral of this story is this: God knows what He’s doing in each of us. He is the potter, and we are His clay. He will mould us and make us, and expose us to just enough pressures of just the right kinds that we may be made into a flawless piece of work to fulfill His good, pleasing and perfect will. So when life seems hard, and you are being pounded and patted and pushed almost beyond endurance; when your world seems to be spinning out of control; when you feel like you are in a fiery furnace of trials; when life seems to “stink”, try this: Brew a cup of your favorite tea in your prettiest tea cup, sit down and think of this story, and then, have a little talk with the Potter.



Justice - When you get what you deserve.
Mercy - When you don’t get what you deserve.
Grace - When you get what you don’t deserve.



The Fire The story is told of a fire that destroyed 2,500 homes in 1991 in California. When the devastated owners returned and sifted through the black debris, they found that all their possessions had been reduced to soot. But one man and his daughter discovered a tiny porcelain rabbit. They marveled that so fragile an object had survived intact. Other victims of that catastrophe also found pottery and porcelain items that had defied the inferno. That Sunday after the disaster a local minister carried to his pulpit an unbroken vase which was the only thing recovered from his home. He asked his congregation, “Do you know why this is still here and my house is gone?” He answered his own question by saying, “Because this had passed through the fire once before.” Fiery trials may be very painful, but if by God’s grace we endure them, our trust in God can emerge from the blazing furnace purer and stronger than it was before.