Treasures in Jars of Clay

I can remember as a kid getting clay from a nearby creek and trying to fashion it into something artistic or at least functional. Yet I was always somewhat limited by the fragile nature of the material. And who has never broken a clay flower pot? Yet flower pots are still useful, and often bear invaluable treasures, growing out of the earth placed in the pot – the same earth that gets transmogrified into us earthlings.

The plants I’m collecting on my sabbatical here in Australia are not full-blown plants with roots, stems, leaves and flowers, and the jars of clay I am using are small one-inch capsules called Eppendorf tubes. Into these tubes, our collectors, wherever they be in the world, place a small fragment of a leaf, no larger than a finger nail, and let it die there in the tube, surrounded by the drying power of silica preservative. Yet, these are indeed treasures, because these tiny leaf fragments, dead as they may be, contain all the DNA for the making of the mile-a-minute plant. When mile-a-minute grows from seed those DNA instructions get transmogrified into a fast-growing vine, capable of flowering, re-rooting, and taking on the many crops it contends with, to our dismay.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7)

The Apostle Paul was actually referring to people, not plants, as the jars of clay in his letter to the Corinthians. Like clay, we as people, even the strongest of us, are very fragile. We would do well to treat each other as highly delicate, breakable objects, and holders of treasures beyond all worth, our souls and bodies fashioned by the ultimate Potter. And when we see our own weaknesses, our readiness to be shattered in an instant, we need to remember our Transmogrifier.

When I first met Shiwangni Rao who works at the cubicle just opposite me in the office here in Australia, we had a good conversation. I misheard her on one point though – I thought she said she was from PNG (Papua New Guinea). We have lots of mile-a-minute samples from PNG, so I wasn’t surprised when she said mile-a-minute grew everywhere in her country, but was a bit surprised at how much her people valued it for medicinal products. One person’s weed is another person’s treasure!

It wasn’t until several months later that I learned that Shiwangni was actually from Fiji (not PNG). That discovery will go down as one of the greatest highlights of my sabbatical. You see, DNA, as well as being a complete instruction set also contains history – the history through many generations of an organism. For our research group here, the hub, the nexus, the center of it all, as far as the conquest of the Pacific Islands by mile-a-minute looks to be Fiji. That’s our theory, based on historical records of its spread in the Pacific. Yet we had no samples from Fiji. So when my brilliant host here in Australia, Leslie Weston, found out Shiwangni was from Fiji, she quickly shared the good news with me, including the fact Shiwangni was soon returning home to Fiji for a visit.

And so today, my DNA wizard Xiaocheng Zhu (aka Diego) and I got to explain the process of sample collection to Shiwangni as she as agreed to retrieve some precious samples for us from Fiji. We will provide her with the clay jars and paperwork she needs, so she can bring back treasures for us to test our Fijian theory. In my few short months here in Australia I’ve had the privilege of meeting many fascinating clay jars and will miss them a lot when I travel back to the other side of the globe. And meeting Shawangni has helped to teach me that you never know when your “average co-worker” might become a pearl of great price.

Of course, no one is really “average”, and we are all capable of harboring treasures of infinite value, within mere jars of clay.