A Delighted-In Creation
“The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.” Zephaniah 3:17
It was June camp a few years ago, one of the first mornings of the session and Ellen-Anne, Anna, and I were unloading the kiln for the first time that summer. We were giddy with excitement to see how the new glazes turned out.
If you have never taken ceramics, let me just give you a little background. You start out with wet clay, make it into whatever creation you want - sometimes on the wheel and sometimes by hand. Next it gets fired for the first time and turns into this hard orange creation. Once it is hard and orange, then it is time to put the color on it! That is called glazing. You dunk it in the glaze and then fire it one last time so that it comes out of the kiln beautiful and shiny.
That is what we were waiting to see - we had not used the glazes that summer and wanted to see what colors they would turn out to be. Our hand made, thought up, designed by us creations were in the kiln. We could not wait to see the finished product. It was almost like Christmas morning - anxiously awaiting what would come out of the kiln.
When we were so excited and couldn’t wait any longer we opened the top of the kiln while it was still very hot inside. But what we saw was so worth it. They were BEAUTIFUL. The colors turned out better than we expected they would.
That was our hard work, our handmade creations in there, in those beautiful new glazes. We were all so delighted in the results we couldn’t contain ourselves. It was giddy laughter and excited tears all mixed together -because at that same moment we were all delighting in our creations in the kiln, we realized that God delights in us the EXACT SAME WAY.
In fact He delights in us even more perfectly because He is God and we are human. We are his CREATION, He designed us, He made us by hand, He DELIGHTS in us. Just like it says in Zephaniah 3:17, He takes GREAT DELIGHT in you. God delights in us just like we were delighting in our own creations coming out of the kiln.
But the best part about God’s delight is that He doesn’t have to wait for us to “come out of the kiln”. Because of Jesus, we are perfect the way He created us to be in his eyes. He delights in you the way you are right now.
You are beautifully created by the God of the Universe, and He so delights over you that He “rejoices over you with singing”.