Battered, Beaten, and Better Than Before

In college I majored in politics and communication, which is a fancy way of saying I was bad at math. After graduating I went to work for (pause for cautionary reminder that Jesus requires you to be kind and forgiving to everyone) the United States House of Representatives. I now work in a congressman’s state office, so when he is on the House floor debating the wisdom of a new proposal to provide free dentures to infants (based on a recent study, funded by the denture industry, showing that virtually all infants have no teeth), I stand in for him at local community events that often involve barbecues and homemade ice cream. But my job is hardly just a day at the park. Often, I must attend dinners that feature prime rib. It is a difficult job, but someone has to do it.

Each April it falls to me to stand in for my boss at a classic car show called Kool April Nites. I walk through row after row of painstakingly restored automobiles as I try to pick a winner for the coveted “Congressional Award.”

I always like to look for a car that is accompanied by a photo album that chronicles the restoration process. Often, the reclaimed car was a rusty hulk in someone’s barn or field, covered in pigeon poop or home to rodents. If these cars could talk, they would be saying things like, “Brother, can you spare a quart of oil?” or “Boy, is my manifold hurting this morning!” They might even whisper, “Please help me.”

One year, I gave an award to a 1930s Cadillac that someone hauled out of a field where it sat rusting and forgotten for decades, overgrown by blackberry bushes and home to the biggest beehive ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. If you hucked a rock at that car, there were enough bees to get it airborne.

I love it when I meet the owner of a car like this. The guy saw this beat-up wreck, and where the average person saw a hunk of junk, the restorer saw incredible potential. Some of these cars are not merely restored to their stock condition, but vastly and extravagantly improved to the point where they become automotive works of art worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I think that impulse to redeem and restore old beater cars reflects something in the heart of God, who delights to find wreckage and make it unimaginably better than it had ever been before. It’s precisely what He does with us.

We are all the spiritual equivalent of a 1953 Studebaker that has been hit by a train, exposed to decades of wicked Minnesota winters, used as target practice by teenagers and left as a condominium for spiders.

God hauls us out of the junk yard and sets about the task of making us lavishly better versions of what we could have ever hoped or dreamed we’d be. But this restoration does not happen overnight. He has to sand off the rough spots, bang out the dings, smooth out the crushed fenders and replace all that cracked glass. It is a process known as “life.”

If cars could form vowel sounds as their engines are overhauled, I think we would hear a lot of “Ow! Ow! Ow!” noises. There is a lot of banging and pounding in the restoration process, but the result is glorious.

So trust the Master Restorer, who has promised to complete the good work He began in you on the day He pulled you out of the wrecking yard.

We are all battered, broken works-in-progress. But when God is finished with us, we will be showpieces admired by the angels.