I Throw It Out The Same Day I Make It

It never makes it to the morning.

That is the pattern and you have probably never described it to anybody in those words. You make something. You look at it for about an hour, which is the dangerous hour. And then it goes.

Not dramatically. You do not throw it across the room. It goes into the trash under something else, or into the fire, or out to the bin on your way to do something ordinary, and by bedtime the evening has left no trace.

The house is exactly as it was. Nobody knows you made anything.

I want to look at what actually happens in that hour, because it is not that the thing gets worse. The object does not change. What changes is that the making stops and the looking starts, and the looking is done by somebody who has already decided.

While your hands are moving, it is fine. The hour after they stop is when it turns.

And there is a second thing in it, which is that the disposal is not really about the object. Something in you needs the evening to have left nothing, because a thing on a shelf is evidence, and evidence can be seen by somebody, and somebody seeing it means somebody knowing that you tried.

That is the actual fear, and it is not about quality at all.

You are not throwing away a bad object. You are removing the proof that you attempted something.

He made it again

There is a scene where God sends a prophet to a workshop rather than giving him a sermon, and what he sees there is the message.

Jeremiah goes down to the potter's house. There is a man at the wheel. And something goes wrong, in front of him, in the ordinary way that things go wrong.

And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. (Jeremiah 18:4, King James Version)

Marred in the hand of the potter.

Not marred later. Not marred by somebody else. It went wrong while he was holding it, which is where things go wrong.

And then: so he made it again. There is no gap in that sentence. No standing back, no assessment, no evening spent deciding what the failure means. The clay is still on the wheel and it is still clay.

You are in the hand of a potter who does not stop at the marring, and Jeremiah 18:4 gives no space at all between the ruin and the remaking. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene from a workshop floor and lays it on a kitchen table at nine o'clock at night.

And notice what he did not do. He did not bin the clay. The material was never the problem, and there is nothing in the story about the clay being unsuitable.

You have material that was never the fault, and it is already settled in the written word that the potter kept what he was holding. His Spirit is the one who says that over a woman who has been getting rid of the evidence for years.

The hour after the hands stop

Now let me stay with that hour, because it is the whole battlefield and it is very short.

While the hands are moving, the thing is a process. It is not finished, so it cannot be judged, and a person is inside it rather than in front of it. That is why the making itself has never been the problem.

Then your hands stop and it becomes an object. And an object can be assessed, and the assessing has been running unopposed in that hour for a long time.

You are held in the hour where the assessing runs, and Jeremiah 18:4 shows a potter who did not pause between the marring and the making again. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a person through sixty minutes with a bin two feet away.

But here is what is worth knowing. That hour ends. If the thing survives until morning, the morning is different. Not because it looks better, but because the hour has passed, and the hour is where the disposal happens.

And what comes off that table is not a measure of you. It never has been. It is a thing you made on a Tuesday with your own hands and it says nothing about anybody.

You are not required to pass judgment on your own work an hour after making it, and heaven has never once asked for a same day verdict. Jeremiah 18:4 keeps the clay and remakes it without any pause for assessment, and the Spirit of God is the one who gets a person through one hour.

And do not compromise on this by photographing it and then binning it. I know that move. That is keeping the record and destroying the thing, and it does not count.

You have permission to let something you made stay in the house, and this is yours: the potter did not throw the clay out and neither does He. It is written in Jeremiah 18:4 that he made it again, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a description of how you are handled.

Twenty minutes, and it survives the night

So here is the ask, and the second half is the entire point.

Tonight, make something for twenty minutes with whatever is already in the house.

And then let it still be in the house in the morning.

You have permission to let a drawer count as keeping it, and Jeremiah 18:4 says the marred clay never left the potter's hand. The Holy Spirit is the one who counts a shut drawer as a thing surviving the night.

That is it. It does not have to be on display. Put it in a drawer if you need to. It does not have to be shown to anybody and nobody has to know. It just has to be somewhere in the building when you wake up.

The hour will come. Around the time you finish, there will be a pull to deal with it, and it will feel practical and tidy and reasonable. It is none of those things. Put it down and walk out of the room.

It will be bad. That is expected and it is not the subject tonight. Leave it bad, do not improve it before bed, and do not put it somewhere you will forget it on purpose.

You are covered while something you made sits in the house overnight, and Jeremiah 18:4 is the ground under that. The written word shows a potter keeping marred clay in his own hand, and the Spirit of God is present in a kitchen at ten at night with somebody deciding not to reach for the bin.