Monkey Bars

When we were kids, we often played on playground equipment that seemed designed to purposefully reduce the population—or that may have been purchased and sponsored by the local hospital center. Apparatus such as monkey bars that were eight feet off the ground with no belts or rubber landing. Swing sets that could launch you outside the sand pit some 25 feet. Or what about the playground carousel or spinner? When you spun people around using more than one strong body on the outside, you could reach high speeds and watch individuals lose their gravitational pull and shoot across the horizon in parallel terror.

What’s interesting about the playground carousel or spinner is that if you stayed near the center, you could manage the force and were able to hang on. But the farther you moved toward the edge, the more the laws of physics had their way. At the circumference, both speed and force reach their greatest intensity. Bodies would fly.

When a lump of clay is placed onto a pottery wheel for shaping, it is cast onto the “bat”—the table or flat disk of the wheel. It is placed in the very center, where it can be shaped and molded at an appropriate pace and speed that creates an optimum experience for forming and molding the vessel.

And yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, and you are the potter. We all are formed by your hand.

Isaiah 64:8

It is the Father’s hands that are molding us and, with the firmness needed, keeping us in the “center” of His purpose. Not given to extremes or such speeds that would not be possible or conducive to forming anything of worth.

Stay under His hands. Let Him set the pace and mold you. Don’t run to the edges for excitement and a thrill. Not only is the safest place to be under His hands, but it is also the most productive.

Submit your will to His wheel, for He is working His masterpiece.