Divine Dirt Clods

If you've seen the movie "Mystery Date", you may remember that one of the "clues" in the movie is an Chinese proverb to "look in the pot". In the proverb, a man's father dies and leaves him a plain old pot as his total inheritance. The man is upset that his father didn't do more for hm, sticks the pot up on a shelf and forgets about it. Over the years that man falls on hard times and suffers poverty and hunger. He becomes angry and bitter. One day the pot is accidentally knocked off the shelf and breaks... and out spills gold. It had been there the entire time but the man had never bothered to take the lid off the pot and look inside.

I was talking to someone the other day about a video he had seen at his church recently. Apparently one phrase he heard on that video really stuck out in his memory... that we are just "divine dirt clods". What is meant by that? Scripture says that God created man by taking a lump of mud and breathing into it--into us-- the breath of life. So, of ourselves we are nothing, but it is His life breathed into us that changes us from being just a lump of dirt to a living being-- divine dirt clods.

Maybe this is what St. Paul was thinking of when he wrote that God put "this glory in earthen vessels". One of the beauties of God's grace is that God sees us as we are... with our weaknesses, our frailties, our lack of anything... and yet chooses us and fills us with His Spirit.

Many times, we are like the pot in the proverb. People may look at us and only see an old, used vessel. Yet, within us is a great treasure. Not because of us... but because He has chosen us. He has chosen to breathe He his life into us, to fill us with His Spirit, to give value and worth to us just because of His love for mankind.

And so (to really mix metaphors)... we're more than just an old pot-- we're divine dirt clods.