A Lesson in Pottery (a story)

Taking a lesson from my poem of the same title, I decided to merge the lesson into a true story of a small period of my life.

 

A Lesson in Pottery

 

            When you’re a realist it’s hard to take something simply for what it is. You take every little detail of life, turn it inside out, and then hope there’s some of it left to enjoy it. You find it hard to trust anyone or anything, and don’t even remember why this is. You’d like to think this is just the way you are or that this is the result of your past, but in reality you just plain don’t know why you are the way you are or what your purpose in life is. This is the story of my summer. This is where I found my purpose: To treat my world like clay, to mold it into something great.

 

            I believe it was the 18^th of July, when a small, yet unassuming youth group set off through the morning to St. Louis, Missouri. I would have figured I’d know what to expect from the St. Louis missions trip, after all, it wasn’t my first trip. I had also been to New Orleans a few months after hurricane Katrina hit. I remember the trip being an unforgettable experience seeing demolished homes and empty neighborhoods. I remember harsh hours of labor, trying all we could to restore a home to its former glory. Now, heading to a city far from devastation, I really didn’t know what to expect. I guess I could even go as far as to say that I thought it would be less important than my former missions trip. Nonetheless, we were on our way, we expected to be used.

            Seeing the riverside metropolis for the first time was, quite frankly, almost just as I’d expected it. It was a city, it had buildings, an arch, and it was big. Driving to our destination didn’t help pump me up for the trip, if anything it increased my worries as to whether or not anything great would become of the trip. Where we arrived was a rather beat up elementary school. The school was obviously unused for the summer; it was now in possession of Youth Works, the organization of which we chose to plan our trip with. In the school there were about four or five other youth groups, all of which were significantly larger than our own. One of the first things I noticed was how different our group was from all the others. They were exactly how I’d imagine a stereotypical youth group. They were bubbly, and kind, and always up for games, and always sharing their faith. This wasn’t to say that our group was an emotionless, unkind, faithless band of strangers. We loved each other, and we loved our fellow believers, it was just that there was something else, that of which we all felt, that was holding us in a state of uneasiness. I came to believe that our problems way back in Indiana had followed us to St. Louis. I decided to try not to worry about it.

            The next day our youth group was split and mixed into other groups to go off into the city and do our designated job. The group I was with, put bluntly, was sent to the ghetto. This was a place that was very poverty stricken, with beat up homes and unclean streets. Some houses had gapping holes in the roofs and some looked as if they didn’t have roofs at all. Most, if not all, of the houses had overgrown yards, with vine covered fences and giant hedge bushes. There was no mistaking that what we were doing here was going to involve manual labor. I was immediately right. Our coordinators stationed in the neighborhood sent us out to clean out a fence line near where numerous neighborhood kids where playing kickball. We were rather shocked when we began to discover used crack pipes and other such harmful items. It’s the kind of thing you’d like to think the media over exaggerates all the time. Unfortunately between the stowed away items and the unbearable neighborhood, I began to loose hope in what we were doing. Even after the entire fence was clean, I looked down the street and saw dozens more overgrown fence lines, several more beat up homes, and several more lives we’d never get to help.

            After starting for a while on another yard, our first day of work was forced to come to an end. Though we were happy to have done any work at all, there was no hiding the sense of uncertainty that we all felt. There was one simple fact: we would never clean up the entire neighborhood, and neither would the group after us and the group after them and so on and so on. We left the neighborhood nearly the same as when we’d come. We went to the public showers, we went back to the school to eat, we worshiped and then we went to bed.

            The second day started the same as the first. We went off in our same groups and went to the same places. This time we did full maintenance on a yard just down the street from our last project. The work was pretty much the same except with the edition of lawnmowers and weed whackers. I remember one of the highlights of that day was meeting Virgil, a homeless man living in the neighborhood. My youth Pastor, being the outgoing guy he is, decided to make conversation with him, asking him about the neighborhood and what it’s like living here. Much to my surprise, Virgil delivered the first upset of my expectations for the trip. Virgil was a happy man. Even when struggling for each meal and living in a local house illegally, he could not stop talking about how he didn’t care about his situation. He said he didn’t worry because he knew that God was taking care of him. Being one of faith myself, this put a smile on my face, but wasn’t something that rocked my world. It’s something that Christians say all the time, just put faith in the hands of God. It was nothing new.

            Eventually we prayed with Virgil and he went on his way, we resumed work. Everything seems the same until somewhere between Brett working on the lawnmower and Andrew manning the weed whacker, something began to stir in me. What is a possession when it doesn’t bring you satisfaction? In my nice comfortable home in Indiana, I’m still not satisfied. I think I began to realize why Virgil was the way he was. I just wasn’t quite there yet.

            It was that night that everything seemed to change. It was that night that everything boiled over. My troubles came together with my newfound revelation, and I couldn’t really handle it. That’s why in the third story of that ramshackle little elementary school I just let everything go, made the decision to sacrifice my desire to be self-sustaining and accepted a life of satisfaction. And that is something I can never forget, that is what a memory means to me.

            It became no enigma from then on that all the labor that was done in St. Louis was done in confidence that it wasn’t in my hands. It was then that I began to see great things happen. I began to see things differently. The world is almost as if it’s made of clay, things can start as an idea in our head, then we can mold it, and we can smooth it, and we can create it into something great. It’s things like worry, apathy, and aggression that bring us down. If these things can just be left to faith then why would anyone need to worry, why would anyone not care, why would people be aggressive? I left St. Louis a different person. This is why I remember this so clearly, because it was the memory that made me.

 

Author's Note

No limits.