Not perfect, but better

When my husband dragged the old dresser off his truck after yard-saling, my first reaction was “ugh”! Painted a sick dark green, missing knobs, gouged, and full of stickers and marker-pen graffiti, it was a sight. But we’d already decided to join our neighbor in holding a yard sale, so I took on the task of making it “marketable.”  After washing it down, I primed and then painted it.  We found enough matching knobs.  Behold, it was soon ready for a second life. Not perfect, but better.

As I worked away, I thought how it might illustrate how Jesus redeems us from “ugh” lives marred and damaged by sin. Paul wrote about the process in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.

The analogy isn’t perfect, however. The dresser got an exterior makeover with paint, but Jesus works through transformation, from the inside out:

We...are being transformed into his [Jesus’] likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

My parents gave me this

butterfly necklace when

I graduated from a one-year

intensive Bible school course.

The word “transformed” comes from the Greek metamorphoo, which of course is related to the English word for “metamorphosis” in the insect world. After a brief life consumed with “consuming,” a caterpillar is enveloped in an ugly sac called a chrysalis. Within it, the caterpillar transforms to a butterfly, finally emerging into a new life. No wonder that this amazing process eventually became a symbol for the spiritual reality of being “born again.”

Jesus, in fact, had some harsh words about religious leaders of His day who excelled at "pretend-religion." They tried to look good on the outside but had dark, wretched, proud, judgmental hearts. He didn’t win any popularity contests with them, especially when He called them “whitewashed tombs,” pretty on the outside but full of death inside (Matthew 23:27-28).

I won’t say my refurbished dresser was totally “pretty on the outside.” It was still an old, scarred dresser.  But it had a second chance at being useful. And that’s just like God.  No matter how beat up and scarred we get from our bad choices and the inevitable hard places in life, He can still renew and use us. 

The rest of the story on the dresser?  A woman driving by our home a few days before the sale noticed it with its dangling price tag amidst other sale items we were gathering in the driveway. She was putting her 90-something mother in a care home and it was just what she needed as she prepared the room.