Waxworks

I remember a breakthrough moment I had in my past, when six months into life with our fourth child I thought every cry for food in the middle of the night was the cry that would undo me.  I remember crying and crying and waking up with audible pleas on my tongue begging God to give me rest.  

Pietro gently encouraged me to change the focus of my prayer. To stop praying for the change of the outward circumstance but to pray for God to give me the strength and endurance and patience necessary to rise to the task and to get through the next day and the next, and the next. 

Maybe the greater miracle is not the answer to ones prayer for the change of circumstances, but the work that God does within when the circumstances don’t change. When the going is tough and the obstacles are many and I am tired and unraveled and realize there are only two ways this can go. The same sun that melts the wax can harden clay. 

When the heat is up and the pressure is on, I can be melted like wax and allow myself to be molded into whatever shape He chooses to pour me into, something He guarantees will be good and lovely and of benefit to Him.  Or I can dry up into an unpliable, twisted, gnarled vessel of hardened clay, prone to crack and shatter when battered. 

I am prone to harden, but I hate the cold, rough brittleness of dried clay.  Oh, I want to learn to melt into something soft, warm and pliable. To learn in the melting that circumstances should not and could not sway my resolve to pursue a life filled with grace, peace, joy , patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self control by God’s grace at work in me. That these characteristics can become fragrant essential oils stirred into the mix of me plus my circumstances plus my response to equal under the craftsmanship of His hand  a waxwork that is far bigger and better and more beautiful  than life as I currently know it.