MY IMPERIAL CHINESE "VAHZ"

When I looked in the packing crate my late husband Ted brought home one day a few decades ago, the contents appeared to be miscellaneous hunks of broken pottery. “Are you headed for the dumpster or the land fill?

 “On the contrary,” he assured me with a twinkle in his eyes. “This is a collection of valuable potential. Just wait and see!” Here's the rest of the story....

At one point in our ministry among international students on university campuses, one of our fellow staff members was a lady of some means who had been a world traveler. Through the years she had amassed many beautiful and expensive art objects. She was now downsizing to an apartment and hired some workmen to help her pack and move. “Be careful! This is fragile!” she shouted—too late—as they attempted to move an over three foot high, extremely heavy porcelain Chinese “vahz” (it was too elaborate and costly to be called a mere “vase.”) 

It had a massive lid which itself weighed about thirty pounds topped with a ferocious looking Chinese lion with its front paws on a ball in a traditional oriental pose. Despite the weight of this art object, it stood on only three claw-like legs with two more lions serving as handles on each side. Through careless handling, the lid fell off, the lion broke into pieces, and the entire “vahz” toppled and crashed to the floor.

To compound the grief of the owner of the Ming Dynasty original art object, a genuine registered antique, she had just signed a bill of sale for its purchase by the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Now it was not only useless but no longer salable. Our friend swept up the pieces and filled a large wooden packing box with the discards. When my husband came by to offer his help in moving, she told him about the sad mishap and asked if he could arrange to have it hauled to the dump. He asked her if he could have the pieces and she readily assented.

In his spare time Ted painstakingly assembled the massive jar like a jigsaw puzzle and realized that although small shards of porcelain were missing, the major pieces were all there. Over the weeks, actually months and with lots of patience, skill, and TLC, he glued it together again with something far stronger than Elmer's glue, and improvised with a filler for the gaps in the object. When completed, although it will always bear the scars of its misadventure, it is nevertheless a beautiful, stately piece of art once more. 

We brought it along with us through the years from house to house wherever we lived in different states across the country. It stands proudly now more than fifty years later in the corner of the entryway to my home, Eagle Summit, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

You can see the huge hollow capacity when you carefully lift the heavy lid. What did we use it for during the years of our ministry? We would pour a hundred pounds of white rice into it at a time and still there was room—we used a lot of rice for meals in our hospitality ministry among Chinese university students in the various cities where we worked. It was a secure place to store rice and keep it away from mice since the little rodents certainly couldn't lift the massive lid—especially with the scary menacing lion guarding it.

Our classical Ming Dynasty “Vahz” has become a conversation piece with people who ask about and admire it when visiting us. It stands solidly now as a witness of what God can do in our lives no matter how broken and unredeemable we may be or perceive that we are in any areas of our lives. Careless hands may cause our downfall. We may no longer think of ourselves as costly and of worth. Although God created us to be precious vessels in which He wanted to dwell by His Holy Spirit, we still have free will and it can happen that we become marred even while we are in the hands of the Master Potter, in the story in Jeremiah 18. We are not hopeless and hapless. He delights to “make us again” according to His perfect plan with His Tender Loving Care into new vessels of honor.

Our Ming “Vahz” was used to hold “the bread of life.” Rice rather than bread is culturally regarded as the indispensable staff of life among Asian people. Our “vahz” has become a vessel unto honor by virtue of what it contains, symbolizing our Lord Jesus, who called Himself the Bread of Life. The lions on our “Vahz” are an analogy to our Lord who is called the Lion of Judah.

None of us is just plain and ordinary to God. We are not lost in the shuffle of humanity that populates the world. We are not nobodies. He transforms us into living, creative art objects of His own design, fit to display in the Master's Kingdom by embellishing us with the gifts of His Spirit into His own unique designs. We each have our own story of redemption, just as the Ming dynasty artwork all over its round surface tells us stories, if only we could interpret them. 

In its broken condition, our Ming Dynasty “vahz” was no longer regarded as worthy of the Chinese Embassy's museum, therefore no money passed hands for its purchase. It was headed instead for the dumpster—as were we without Christ—but God through Jesus Christ paid a high price for us at the Cross. My husband Ted saw beyond its brokenness and had plans for the redemption of the “vahz.” God's plans for us are for good and not for evil, with a future and a hope.