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