The Bike Frame That Got a Second Shape

In 2019, a welder named Marco Hernandez opened a small custom bicycle shop in Portland, Oregon. He specialized in handbuilt steel frames, bending and brazing each tube by hand. One afternoon, a customer brought in a frame Marco had built months earlier — cracked at the down tube joint after a hard crash. The customer assumed it was ruined. Marco just smiled.

He clamped the frame to his workbench, cut away the damaged joint, and began heating the steel until it glowed orange. Slowly, patiently, he re-mitered the tube, reshaping the junction at a stronger angle than before. He added a reinforcing gusset he hadn't used in the original design. When he finished, the frame wasn't just repaired — it was structurally superior to what it had been.

"The steel doesn't know what I'm making," Marco told the customer. "It just has to stay on the bench."

That is the pottery wheel of Jeremiah 18. When the vessel was marred in the potter's hand, the potter did not sweep the clay into the trash. He pressed it down and began again — "another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make." The Almighty does not look at your fractured places and see waste. He sees material. He sees possibility. The heat and the pressure are not punishment. They are the hands of a Creator who refuses to discard what He has chosen to shape. The only thing required of the clay is to stay on the wheel.