Shelved for a while

Having said everything yesterday about how God makes us and treasures us, but while I was looking for the verse about not forgetting the baby borne, I ran across the verse Isaiah 45:9. This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

He created us like a potter, and we are the clay. He decided what He wanted to make me, and I may or may not be happy with that. I want to be a gilded vase, and end up being a crock pot or chamber pot...

No doubt we all have the desire to be self-important, respected, and admired. We want to be the one in the lime-light...preaching, teaching, leading while serving. We want to be made from the best fabric, used with the best pattern, and hung in the National Quilt Museum for people to see and stand in awe. We don't like to think that we might be the gunny sack, the laundry bag, the underwear, the cleaning rag. Fabric is used for all kinds of reasons, and the fact that we need cleaning rags tells us something. No one would use gold lame to wipe a spill...it is not made for that. It wouldn't do a good job of it, anyway. It would scratch the glass, smear the dirt, and ruin the cloth, which would tear or shred. It takes a sturdy, lint-free cloth, soft and clean, to do that job. It may be washed to be reused, or it may be tossed into the trash, having accomplished the task it was designed for.

Maybe you feel like a rag...maybe you feel like you are too fragile to do much good and can't work hard like the gal in the pew next to you. Maybe you are course, or stiff, or flimsy, or dark or light or the wrong color to go with your surroundings. Maybe you feel like your stash...just sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. You were bought, but not put to work. You feel like your life is being wasted just sitting there in the house, not out on a mission field or fulfilling some desire you have.

God tells us He knows the plans He has for us, and that those plans are good. Joseph spent a LOT of time waiting, having been loved, hated, used, abused, and accused. But God fulfilled His purpose, not by putting him on the shelf, but waiting for the right time to use him. Leaving him on the shelf was not wasting him, for He spent that time in Joseph's life preparing him for the task to come. He had connections, a reputation, showed himself a leader even in the jail, and shaped him to be a vessel of loveliness and provision for the entire part of that world in which he lived. He blessed his family from afar and preserved them as well as others.

So piece of fabric on the shelf... the plans are being made for you. I have bought so much material without a plan...I let it cure on the shelf, look at it, pet it, and wait for the time or the idea to come to me to put it to its best use. It should not be discouraged, for someday it will fulfill its purpose and become something that it was meant to be. God is wiser than I, and He knew from time and eternity what He made each of us for. And we need to be patient and place our hope in Him that we will fulfill His purposes and that our lives are not wasted in the waiting.