On the drive home from our shopping excursion Thursday evening, the conversation turned to the subject of a young man we have known for many years who, after being out of jail only a few months, just this week made a plea deal and was taken into custody to serve a 7 year sentence for more crimes he’s committed.\u00c2\u00a0 I said that, sadly, he seems to be what we call incorrigible.<\/p>\n
Jacob exclaimed, “We shouldn’t encourage <\/em>him!”<\/p>\n Seeing how he had misconstrued the word, I explained that I wasn’t saying “encourage-able” but “incorrigible, which means someone who cannot be reformed.”<\/p>\n Jacob replied, “Oh, you mean like hardened clay.”<\/p>\n Oftentimes the way his thoughts run to puns brings us to tears of hilarity, but this play on words immediately brought to mind both the passages in scripture (eg. Isaiah 64:8<\/a>) about God being the potter while we are the clay, and Pharaoh, (Exodus 7-11<\/a>) who “hardened his heart.”\u00c2\u00a0 Pharaoh was a perfect example of someone who was “incorrigible” – despite all the opportunities he was given to turn away from doing evil and choose to do good, he continually made the wrong choices, until his heart was so hard that he could not be re-formed<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n We will continue to pray earnestly for this young man, and his family, because the ending of his story is not yet written; we know that while there is life, there is hope, and as is true for us all, the Potter is not yet finished forming him for His glory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the drive home from our shopping excursion Thursday evening, the conversation turned to the subject of a young man we have known for many years who, after being out of jail only a few months, just this week made a plea deal and was taken into custody to serve a 7 year sentence for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,598],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devotional","category-netties-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15222,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/15222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.adoptedjoy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}