When I was a little girl…I LOVED, absolutely loved, playing in the mud. Much of my time was spent making pots and cakes and unusual little houses decorated with flowers and grasses. I am quite sure, like my granddaughter in the above photo, I was immersed in the material head to toe.
My little treasures built with painstaking care, would sit on a shelf to dry. They were beautiful until the light of the very next day consumed them and they crumbled to pieces. I would weep in sadness, blame my brothers for their demise and generally grieve over their loss until I was distracted with yet another pot to build.
“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a woman, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” -1 Corinthians 13:11
The pots I built as a child were temporary expressions of creativity. Now I would look at their crude construction with amusement, but then, they were masterpieces of my ability and all that I knew how to do.
The age of building mud pots was critical to my development and a fond and distant memory. There have been times though, like now, when I find myself back to sitting in the mud and spending hours molding little mud objects.
I am convinced that there is no ‘judgement’ of this practice. The mud creations are necessary and inherent in our growth as human beings. I believe that God the Father looks upon this fondly and encourages us (me) to stretch and experiment and try the steps of the dance, over and over and over again. How kind and how good is it that we can rest in the becoming and not feel ‘less than’ or abnormal.
I confess that I have judged myself. I have felt incapable and unworthy and cast aside and then, self-condemned to a life of mediocre. That is NOT at all what the Creator had in mind for Betsy.
The mud pots were simply a starting point. May I suggest that they could also be a returning place? Might it be when Jesus told His disciples not to interfere with the children flooding in to see Him and the Word he gave that one must come as a child to enter the Kingdom, that He was speaking of this component? Going back, on occasion, with a pure heart, a willing spirit, a trusting attitude, to that place where the little pots were built by chubby hands and such care was given in the simplest of activities.
I recall as a young teenager, sitting on a riverside with my friend building drip castles for hours. It was a time of rapid mental, spiritual and physical change in my life. Those drip castles were SO important. I can still remember the joy at their creation, the rest that I felt; the camaraderie with a like-minded friend.
Our lives are but a candle in a wide expanse of time. Let us all burn brightly! Let us not judge ourselves with such ferocious expectations that leave out the joy and the dance.
I stand at this place, feeling the depths of my soul, stretching and shrinking. Ebbs and flows…
I give myself permission to play in the mud. I feel God’s favor on me. I feel His Love. It makes me cry. It makes me laugh. It makes me dance!
“And calling to Him a child, He put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you TURN and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” -Matthew 18: 1-3
Love, Betsy