Silly Putty

Put your child’s elec­tronic games on the shelf for a while and buy him or her some Silly Putty. It is a lot more fun and requires imag­i­na­tion. I hope they still make it. As I remem­ber, it came in an egg-shaped con­tainer. It would stretch to amaz­ing lengths and even bounce when rolled into a ball and tossed against a hard sur­face. Silly Putty feels good in your hands. It comes to life when it is warmed up a lit­tle. (An advanced tool for shap­ing it is a Pop­si­cle stick.)

Silly Putty has served as one of my inner spir­i­tual metaphors since child­hood. The Old Tes­ta­ment prophets used the pot­ter and the clay as an anal­ogy for God’s attempt to shape us. I still like to use that one too. Like a good pot­ter, Deity occa­sion­ally starts over — and calls us to do the same. Go back to mush and start again. Stay pli­able. Choose who and what shapes you. Work with it.

Elec­tronic toys have their place, but they inhibit imag­i­na­tion. They “guide” the player along the lines of the pro­gram. With Silly Putty it is all up to the per­son. Good putty is a lit­tle resis­tant. It requires some effort from the out­side shap­ing forces. What­ever is made is orig­i­nal. Best of all — you can see your fin­ger­prints on it.

I hope God’s fin­ger­prints are on me. I am sure I have not been all that coop­er­a­tive and a bit of a chal­lenge even for the Ulti­mate Cre­ator. Being shaped seems awk­ward — even painful at times. The con­test is between let­ting myself be shaped pas­sively by the world’s forces or cre­atively in the hands of God. I am not neu­tral in the out­come. It is my job to be more resis­tant to some forces than oth­ers — and to dis­cern true cre­ativ­ity from mere worldly imitation.

Left to itself, Silly Putty set­tles into the shape of its con­tainer. For it to be fun it has to live in the hands of a con­stant shap­ing char­ac­ter inter­ested in its potentials.