Tears in a Bottle

“So I went down to the potter’s house and saw him working with clay at the wheel. He was making a pot from clay. But there was something wrong with the pot. So the potter used that clay to make another pot. With his hands, he shaped the pot the way he wanted it to be.” Jeremiah 18:3-4

I remember a woman coming to our church to preach back about 35 years ago. In the middle of the stage, a potters wheel was set up, and with it a lump of clay on the wheel. She wore a well-used apron and started talking about how God, as creator, had in mind exactly what He was going to make out of that lump of clay. She explained that the clay had to be massaged and worked to make sure there were no pieces of stone or hardened clay in the lump. She showed how, when a potter makes a vessel, he uses water as the lubricant to make the clay pliable. After some work, the bowl started taking shape, and as I thought about how awesome it was looking, she suddenly explained that she felt a small stone in the clay. Without thinking about how much progress had been made in the pot, the potter destroyed it again, down to the lump. You see, any experienced potter won’t have a vessel that has stones in it. Stones always translate into weakness in the vessel. After extracting the stone from the lump, she added some more water, and the vessel started to take shape again.

We are never finished in the Master’s hands, and He wants us to be perfectly usable and functional. While the bible doesn’t specifically refer to where God gets the water to make the clay pliable, I like to think that He uses our tears, the ones He stores in bottles, the tears from the pain, trials, and life losses, tears that lubricate the clay. No ordinary water will do when it comes to creating the perfect fix. As with Jesus’ disciples collecting the scraps of bread and fish from the feeding of the 5,000, we get that God is not wasteful. I can imagine that God isn’t wasteful of our tears either.

Now, about the photograph itself.
I rarely shoot setup shots. I'm not big on studio portrait kind of stuff. I can do it, but I don't like it all that much. I like using natural light and shooting candidly. So when I go out shooting, I'm always looking for a good, real image that’s not staged.

In this case, I remember one morning, I usually get up real early, an hour earlier than I need to, so that I can do personal devotions, and it's just the way I function in my day. I was reminded of a scripture in the Book of Psalms about how God collects all of our tears and puts them in a bottle, and I thought that was really an odd concept. We're talking about why God would take all our tears and place them in a bottle. I know I'm approaching this from the wrong perspective. This is about the shot. I'm trying to tell a story about tears in a bottle, about that scripture verse in Psalms.

And so I decided to visualize what that looked like. So I worked very hard trying to figure out how to put this together so it would look elegant. And all I could think of was going to the beach. I bought all these bottles, and I filled them with olive oil. Not all the way up, I just filled them to a lower level with olive oil. And I put them in a tray. I remember laughing at myself, thinking that this isn’t the kind of thing I do. But in this case, I just felt inspired.

I drove to Ventura Beach, and it was at sunset, of course. But it was also really cold. I found myself sitting in the parking lot at Ventura Beach, waiting for the sun to get closer to the horizon. I really wanted there to be some cool clouds in the background, and get some backlit look on the clouds as well as the bottles. But imagination doesn't always work out in real life.

I'm out there in a T-shirt and shorts with my camera, and I have this tray full of olive oil bottles. I almost decided to just go home; this is not working out. So I'm sitting in my car thinking, "Geeze, this is so uncomfortable. I don't want to be here." I was like a whiny little school boy. "You just drove an hour to get here. You already set all this stuff up. Why not just shoot it? Even if it stinks, at least it's shot, who knows, you might get lucky."

Now, if you know me, at the time I was shooting this, I was about 80 pounds heavier than I am right now. So getting down, lying on my stomach on the sand, that's an image in and of itself and probably more interesting than what I was attempting to shoot. Finally, the sun is setting, and I push the sand up a little higher so it covers the box where all these bottles are sitting. And I just started shooting. I had about 15, 20 shots, just watching the sun go down.

When you're looking at the back of your camera, you don't really get a good sense of what things look like. , "Okay, I did my duty. I shot my shots." I got in my car, turned on the heater, and drove home. As is usually the case when I try something, when I work hard, almost every time, something good shows up in post-production. This is what I saw, and I just love it. I love the backlit, the orangish hue through the olive oil in the bottles. It made me feel like they really were tears in a bottle, waiting to be opened up and protected.