It’s not you who shape God, it’s God who shapes you.
This is the ancient Church Father, Irenaeus.
We keep forgetting this. We get into trouble and we keep thinking it’s all our fault and all our doing and that every decision is ours. But it’s not.
It’s not you who shape God, it’s God who shapes you.
So:
If, then, you are the work of God, await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season. Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you. Let the clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers.
I don’t know where you are in your journey. I don’t know what problems you face, what sadness, what fear. What hope. What joy. But here’s the question I want to ask because it’s the question I think I’m being asked, every day: what is God shaping in you right now?
Everything that you’ve been thinking and feeling, everything that has happened to you recently, is in some way part of God’s effort to shape you.
Into what? Towards what?