How much would we each be worth if we were not able to be reshaped?
How could we expect to grow if we could not expect to be torn in pieces?
What characteristics exemplify our worth? Or are we rather born with those certain and steadfast equal and unalienable rights?
What would be our value in number of sparrows?
Take a look at a song link here.
This is based upon a scripture in the Bible about how Jesus watches us very closely.
Nothing in our lives has ever gone unnoticed by Him.
Which brings me to…
The renewing of my home office desk.
Yes. I am sure He watched me working on that days ago too.
But hear me out.
It began with this old shabby piece of wood taken from likely an oak or walnut tree. Several pieces of wood, really.
Someone in the early 1930’s fashioned it into a state-of-the-art four drawer dresser.
From there years of wearing by a family with children destroyed those lower drawers, until one of those children became a man and decided to save the upper frame and both upper drawers as a work bench.
Old things best used twice.
Then flung the layers of black tar! Paint! Colored lacquers! Wood glue!
Deep holes were bore into it, and vices became fused with its ‘desk’ surface.
The wood winced and shuttered at the scourging of these sharp items like nails, screws, hammers and other blocks of wood being slammed against it and chipped into its brawny surface.
It had no idea when it began its life leaving off from the tree that it would ever last so long.
Then the winters came. Summers. Fall. And years.
Somehow it stood proud of its re-purposed usage, even though nothing ever felt the same as the gentle hands of young boys and girls leaning upon it to see into its (long-since-vanished) vanity mirror and looking at their natural faces. Studying and deciding upon what type of person they each would be. Or the Mrs.’ whose eyes lit up as she primped and prepared her hair and make-up for an outing with the love of her life.
But after those years came the cold and isolated storage room.
Now nicked and jaded. Pitted and caked upon with many coatings…
There the two-drawer dresser frame lay under stacks of old doors, extra roofing materials and boxes.
Every so often a mouse or two might then decide to make his home inside one of those two drawers. Among the forgotten contents, he’d toil away to fluff out shreds of bundled cardboard into a warm nest.
Oh! the warmth of the mice as the life of their bodies brought back memories of being in the sunlight in his youth as a tree limb.
Oh the warmth of the sun on his former leaves!
Oh what he Wood give to feel that warmth again.
That place among the living again!
That value again in his old forgotten life.
~ Louise A. Grady