Many years ago, my family hosted a Japanese exchange student in our home for a month. In all the time we spent with Miko, what I remember best is how she taught us to fold beautiful patterned paper in the art of origami. Swiftly, deftly, her fingers creased and tucked until the little square sheets transformed into basket-like dishes, regal cranes, and exquisite heart-shaped envelopes. I would watch her in rapt admiration and begged her to help me create my own set of paper paraphernalia.
I was hardly as skilled as Miko, but I did craft quite a few origami boats. I would fill our bathtub and send the boats gliding across my miniature ocean with gusts of breath. Sometimes I would churn up the water until the little paper vessels were so waterlogged that they began to sink in sorrowful silence to the deepest leagues of the bathtub sea.
Sometimes I would wonder if that's what God does to us.
I think I recognized even then how God's fingers are always creasing, tucking, folding us into new shapes.
I certainly wouldn't know what to do with my paper-square of a soul without Him. And just when I think I'm taking recognizable shape, I realize that the process isn't over...He has more steps in mind, more folds to make.
Sometimes I feel like an origami boat in a bathtub, blown around with unpredictable gusto by some omnipotent and Divine breath.
You'd think it would be terrifying as a boat not to know when the calm would be interrupted with the gusts that toss and turn you so, or with the changeability of the churning water beneath you.
But if you've allowed God to craft you into a vessel of His own, you can greater enjoy the tranquility and better survive the storm.
Maybe we sink when we don't let Him make us ship-worthy.
The less I try to take charge as captain of my life, and the less of my corrupted self I drag into my relationships and interactions with others, the more I feel freedom knowing that God has taken control.
That I am but an origami boat in His hands.
That God can use me however He pleases.
That He can bless me with peacefulness and purposefulness, or send me to the bottom of His sea.
Either way, I trust what He's doing.
I was hardly as skilled as Miko, but I did craft quite a few origami boats. I would fill our bathtub and send the boats gliding across my miniature ocean with gusts of breath. Sometimes I would churn up the water until the little paper vessels were so waterlogged that they began to sink in sorrowful silence to the deepest leagues of the bathtub sea.
Sometimes I would wonder if that's what God does to us.
I think I recognized even then how God's fingers are always creasing, tucking, folding us into new shapes.
I certainly wouldn't know what to do with my paper-square of a soul without Him. And just when I think I'm taking recognizable shape, I realize that the process isn't over...He has more steps in mind, more folds to make.
Sometimes I feel like an origami boat in a bathtub, blown around with unpredictable gusto by some omnipotent and Divine breath.
You'd think it would be terrifying as a boat not to know when the calm would be interrupted with the gusts that toss and turn you so, or with the changeability of the churning water beneath you.
But if you've allowed God to craft you into a vessel of His own, you can greater enjoy the tranquility and better survive the storm.
Maybe we sink when we don't let Him make us ship-worthy.
The less I try to take charge as captain of my life, and the less of my corrupted self I drag into my relationships and interactions with others, the more I feel freedom knowing that God has taken control.
That I am but an origami boat in His hands.
That God can use me however He pleases.
That He can bless me with peacefulness and purposefulness, or send me to the bottom of His sea.
Either way, I trust what He's doing.
Very adorable.
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