When i was a little kid my uncle used to restore antique furniture. He'd find or buy old pieces of junk and then bring them up to his attic and bring them back to their original glory. He'd strip paint, sand,scrape and stain but his specialty was re-caning chairs...you know that reed-looking stuff on the seats of chairs that starts to sag with age (ours as well as the chairs)...
...so he taught me a bit of this trade and as a kid I was of course more fascinated by the process than the product. This stayed with me and i still marvel at seeing hidden beauty uncovered. We all see and feel this to some extent each day when we clean the house, shave, wash the car (or kids or dog). And we always seem to step back and look and that grin creeps onto our faces....
...but the hair grows back, bugs get splattered on the car and the kids chase the filthy dog across the floor. But we saw it, didn't we? The beauty under the scratches. It was there, right? We could of course cover our lives in vinyl, or set up a glass case, or put up red-velvet ropes, but that wouldn't last long. Never-ending perfection will come and we'll live lives where the lines in carpet from vacuuming will never end. But until then we have this different kind of restored perfection to live....
...so this begs the question, where does greatness lie, where does the beauty reside? In doing what we were created to do and being who we were created to be...
...here's a how it happened with a set of Hitchcock Chairs and a rent-subsidized apartment.
I was given a table and four chairs from a very kind person. As i was leaving i was told "those are Hitchcock Chairs, painted over, but Hitchcock". Now i know that each chair had was worth a few hundred dollars (with four, you do the math) and i was tickled by the irony as I unloaded this precious cargo in the parking lot of what many people might call "the projects".
....the "created value" of the chairs attributed to the name was hidden under the paint, their intrinsic value as a simple place to sit was restored. Could I have refinished these chairs, sold them and used the proceeds to purchase many more chairs for other people? Yes I could have.
...but to me that day it seemed as if God was restoring the greatness of those Hitchcock Chairs. Their purpose was restored, and they in turn brought joy.
The Westminster Shorter Catechises states that the "chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." This simply means that we're covered in paint too, and the name of the Master Craftsman is covered. One day all of the junk will be totally stripped away, but until then we are still called to glorify God and we do this by living out our intended purpose...plain and simple. We're not called to put our label on display under glass, we're called to be useful in bringing many daughters and sons to glory in Jesus.
...That day as i brought those chairs into that woman's apartment i actually felt moved to tell her they were Hitchcock Chairs; "hey, these chairs are Hitchcock" I told her, "they're really nice". "Oh yeah?" she replied with no sense of comprehension beyond that fact that she now owned a table and a set of chairs and she and her two children could actually sit at a table to eat. I just wanted to let her know that we were bringing her nice things, not junk.
...kinda like what the Father did by giving us His best in the worst of places, Jesus in a broken land is far greater irony than Hitcock Chairs could ever be in the projects
...of course you can't restore others until you've been restored yourself...check out this out.
happy antiquing
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