The Reclaim Barrel

At a ceramics studio in Decatur, Georgia, potter Ellen Marsh keeps a five-gallon bucket by her wheel she calls "the reclaim barrel." It's where failed pots go — cracked bowls, lopsided mugs, vessels that collapsed under their own weight. Most potters toss their failures in the trash. Ellen drops them in water.

She submerges the broken pieces for days until they dissolve back into soft, workable clay. Every trace of the old shape disappears. The clay that once held the memory of a ruined bowl becomes as formless as it was before it ever touched the wheel.

"We all shrivel up like a leaf," Isaiah confessed. "Like the wind our sins sweep us away." The prophet wasn't offering God a self-improvement plan. He was describing clay that had cracked — a people so far from their intended shape that no patch or glaze could fix them. The only hope was to go back to the beginning.

That's why his next words are so striking: "Yet you, LORD, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand." Isaiah didn't ask the Almighty to repair Israel. He asked Him to remake her — to dissolve what had failed and start again with hands strong enough and patient enough to shape something new.

The reclaim barrel isn't where clay goes to die. It's where it goes to be born again.