WHO AM I

By Alice Adedeji

SAFACS 2023 ENTRY 5

A clay, violently bashed and smashed by cruel hands was I, ever since I could say ash. Forlorn in depressing darkness, formless and empty, I didn't know the meaning of identity except if being abandoned and useless could pass as having a form of 'identity'.

It all started as sweet as the loveliest of honey but ended as bitter as anything you could describe as bitter but I loved it all once upon a fair moon. I was free. Free from the control of my Master who never let me breathe with His endless demands.

"Turn here, roll there!" He would say.

But what was a clay like me doing on a wheel being moulded and moulded endlessly with no results? I was tired but He would always say, "I know what you should be."

Well, I also knew who I should be..... at least I thought I knew. One blessed day, I called it quits and to the other side I went. In there, I wasn't moulded, I was only dissolved back to what I thought I should be; clay. I was left alone for a long while until I started to crave being worked on again.

It happened. As I went through each day, another set of hands worked on me, patting ever so gently at first but cruelly bashing later. I looked down at myself at the end and saw what I had become. I had become a wastebasket or should I say a waste bowl? Different things were dumped into me: lies, anger, immorality, and impurity of every kind but this isn't what I should have been, right? I was more than that. I just had to be more valuable.

There is nothing that has a beginning that does not know what an end looks like. My period of tragedy finally ended as my Master came back for me. How He recognized me in the state I was in still beats my imagination. Suddenly, I was being lifted by strong arms and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe. Then I was carried back to that old familiar wheel and gently, I was remoulded. It took a great deal of time, in fact, I'm still on the wheel but now, I am what I should have been all along; a masterpiece created to do good works which I have been appointed to do from long ago.

That Master of mine is Christ, and I am continually being moulded into His image to do good works. I am not abandoned, left to waste away in sin. I am not a wastebasket but an incredible masterpiece. Apart from Him, I am nothing but in Him, I am everything He wants me to be. That is who I should have been, that is who I am.