The lights of the city look so good

“What kind of song would you give,
if you had a song to give?
What kind of life would you live,
if you had you a life to live?
Wouldn’t you wanna make something good
that you could look on,
give you lots of pleasure?
Yeah, you would.

What about this thing you gave,
what if it weren’t quite perfect,
what if there was something bad about it?
Wouldn’t you still love it just the same?
Wouldn’t you still care about it?
The lights of the city look so good
almost like somebody thought they would.”

Victoria Williams’ song Lights asks us to put ourselves in God’s shoes for a moment and think how he feels about us, his creation. When we create we want to make something that gives pleasure and so we can imagine that God would have felt something similar in creating us. We know too that there is something not perfect, even bad, about human beings. We only have to think for a brief moment of our propensity for violence and conflict to know that God must feel huge sorrow and disappointment over the way in which we have turned out.

And yet, the song says, we continue to love and care for the things we have made even though they are marred and damaged goods. I have a pottery vase that I made at school and which I have kept for 30+ years. I recently saw an exhibition of pottery in Cambridge by the well-known ceramicist Edmund de Waal. If I compare my vase to de Waal’s pots, my vase looks even worse by comparison. It is a pretty poor excuse for a vase but I still keep it because it is something that I made and for that reason it is important to me.

God continues to love us despite our faults and fallibilities; in fact he loves us so much that he sent Jesus to save us so that we can begin to be re-shaped and our faults and failings can, increasingly, be moulded out of us. For this to happen we need to place ourselves in the hands of the God who loves us and allow him to change us as he will. As Marilyn Baker has sung:

“Jesus, You are changing me
By Your Spirit You're making me like You.
Jesus, You're transforming me
That Your loveliness may be seen in all I do
You are the potter and I am the clay
Help me to be willing to let You have Your way
Jesus, You are changing me
As I let You reign supreme within my heart”