salvaged

Tuesday afternoon found me firmly wedging metal between old wood and more old wood, and then gently lifting it apart, with my raincoat hood tied tightly under my chin to try to block some of the wind from reaching my ears. It remains to be seen if the wood is actually worth salvaging. There’s a part of me that just can’t bear to discard things created a time when beauty was valued along with utility, and when detail mattered, and wasn’t considered frivolous. In this age, even the pursuit of preservation of the non-frivolous detail seems frivolous, and I kept asking myself if this matters.

And it came to me again as it sometimes does, when I’m doing something creative, where the process is tedious and the result is not-yet – that we serve a God of great detail, Who has also shown Himself to be very interested in process and method. There is so much of the Gospel message wrapped up a repurposing and restoring project, and while that doesn’t inherently make it worthwhile, it does create soft ground in my heart for the message to sink deeper. Somehow old rusty nails do pierce parts of me emotionally.

When I laid down my hammer an hour or so later and went inside to warm up, I realized again that the process is purposeful, and that the salvage process is sanctification. Forced to slow and focus, the discipline of sticking with a task that is hard is slowly dying in a digital age, and it is simply irreplaceable. We need it. We need things to be hard and we need to do hard things, and the hard things need to challenge us, for us to understand who we really are and to fully comprehend what God is doing with us.