The Potter's Wheel on Main Street

In downtown Asheville, North Carolina, a ceramics studio called Earth and Fire offers a class they call "Second Chances." Instructor Maria Gonzalez takes pieces that students have abandoned — lopsided bowls, cracked vases, collapsed mugs — and demonstrates how a skilled potter can reclaim them. She wets the clay, centers it again on the wheel, and begins reshaping what everyone else had written off.

"The clay doesn't fix itself," Maria tells her students. "It can't straighten its own walls or seal its own cracks. It has to surrender to the hands that know what it was always meant to become."

One evening, a retired pastor named David sat in her class, watching her collapse a ruined pot back into a lump and start over. He wept quietly. He told her afterward, "That's the most honest sermon I've heard in forty years."

Isaiah understood this. When he cried out, "We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand," he wasn't offering a polite metaphor. He was making a desperate confession. Israel had dried out, cracked, and collapsed under the weight of its own wandering. Their righteousness had become like filthy rags. They could not reshape themselves.

Yet Isaiah's prayer is not despair — it is surrender. He places the fractured nation back on the wheel and says to the Almighty: We cannot mend ourselves. But Your hands still know what we were meant to be. Do not remember our sins forever. Shape us again.