Fire On Your Head

I really enjoy working where I have been for the last 4 months. Seriously. Not just because I can blare my radio and listen to preaching mp3s or whatever music I want on my boom box without affecting anyone else at their work stations–but because I see and learn new things every day about how things are made that I never would have given the thought or knew was made by a mold press. Especially about the character of God. You’d be surprised.

Scripture talks of how the Lord is a potter, and we are His clay and in His hands he forms us into His desired masterpiece. We are all His workmanship.

I work as a temporary employee in a molding factory. And this place reminds me of when we played with Play-doh as children; that we’d close a plastic contraption with the plasticine in it, and it would come out the desired shape.

How fitting of an analogy this work environment is to the dealings of God in our lives and our growth.

You see, no two plastic products that get made require the same amount of plastic material to make the finished product. Nor do any require being heated in the mold for the same amount of time. Or have the same dimensions in the mould itself. Nor do they all come out the same sizes, or colors even.

For those of you who can’t get a mental image, let me try describing it to you:

The machines there all have a hose or some kind of hopper that the feed (plastic pellets) are fed into. They then are melted at a high temperature into a liquid form and passed through the machine through an opening that pours it all out into the mold, and then is cooled down while in the mold itself, to be shaped by a lot of pressure and weight into the solid form it will take on permanently. When the mold opens, the part is ready, and the operator (employee) opens the door/gate, and removes it and does anything extra that needs to be done to the part while it cools down or maybe is put directly into a box to be sent eventually to the customer.

If for example, the part will have the company’s name on the part, then the mold in the machine would have the name backwards and inside out on it, so that in the mold as the liquid plastic is cooled down into a solid form, the letters would be pressed into the part to create its opposite image. Everything on the mold is the opposite of how it will show up on the part itself, of course.

So at all times, most of these machines need human involvment, to open the door, remove the part from the mold or catch it when it would fall off at the end of its cycle, and then in most cases, you need to either cut off excess plastic around edges or things, or sand rough edges and surfaces down, or maybe sometimes even just leave them on the table as is, and cool down before they’re ready to be boxed.

I constantly think of how God’s dealings with us must be almost exactly the same, and see the parallels in such biblical imagery as Him being the potter and we’re clay in His hands.

God’s dealings in our life may make us feel like we’re being closed in on, and put all sorts of pressure on usand use all sorts of heat to burn away any impurities that aren’t desired in His finished product. And then once the heat has cooled down He pulls out a knife and cuts off any excess in our character or of our fleshly nature that needs to be disposed of. But more importantly how I am made to realize how no two people are designed alike in His sight and how we’re all going to go through our own tailor-made situations and experiences to mold us and form us into what He wants us to turn out like.

It may make no sense to you now as you are going through whatever you are going through, but trust me, the Master and Potter knows how He wants you to be and turn out, and only has your best interests in mind while dealing with you the way He is. As Dr. Michael Brown says, everything in the kingdom of God goes under the knife–either to cut back or cut off. The tree that bears no fruit gets cut down, while the tree that bears good fruit gets pruned.

I can see God even in a factory job.