Make Over
We looked through an antique shop and a small writing desk imprinted itself
on our wishlist. Dad wanted it for me because the workmanship was superb. But
the cost was prohibitive.
Instead, he made over a chunky little old table for me, salvaged from a scrap
truck on the way to the dump, stripped and stained back to gloss and dignity. He
put a cedar shelf across the back, shining with the incredible sheen of pure
cedar, and held it up with eight miniature turned legs scrounged from the wreck
of an old magazine holder.
The dead junk of society became a centrepiece and we rejoiced in our immediate,
costless make-over.
But was it so immediate or so costless? Years of training and woodworking
skills, years of sixth-sensing dead junk, years of storing the most abused piece
of cedar you have ever seen – a piece covered with layers of mustard yellow
paint, crazed, dirtied, no semblance of cedar about it.
I laughed when he showed it to me: could the ‘cedars of Lebanon’ come out of
that? Had he lost touch with the real world?
And what is the price of imagination, vision, creativity? As I watched him
bending low to his work I noted the frowns of concentration, the hands scarred
by saws, planes and chisels of past years, and I saw him grow weary.
Make-overs never come immediate or costless. The abused, the discarded, the
uglied, take time and dedication to restore.
‘As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins’: Somebody took time
and dedication. Somebody saw underneath the crazed mustard yellow. Somebody had
vision and creativity. Somebody sixth-sensed the dead junk of society to ‘clothe
them with garments of salvation and array them in robes of righteousness.’
The make-overs were free but not costless. ‘By his wounds we have been
healed.’ 1st Peter 2:24.
Free but not costless. They took everything the Carpenter had.
Elizabeth Price