Week #2: Salvaging by Pastor Kelle Nelson

 Week #2.... Salvaging

A couple years ago I set out to paint my dining room furniture.  It was dated, and it seemed to know it.  As with most of us, it’s prime years was somewhere before 1999, yet somehow it just stood there in my dining room refusing to conform to the new standards I had for it.  It just looked tired.  And on top of it, it was a piece of furniture that once held great memories for me and that was also a hard thing to think about.

This was the dining room table that my previous husband and I purchased together for our first home.  A long oval table, six chairs, and a hutch.  The table has memories of amazing meals, and long nights playing board games.  The hutch holds my wedding china and my grandmother’s goblets.  It was the nucleus of fun family events, and now after my divorce it reminded me of what once was, and it was not only old and out of style – it’s seemed ugly and not worth keeping around.  I wanted it gone.  Mostly because it stood as a reminder of something lost, and things I no longer wanted to be reminded of, which continued to make my heart hurt.

Ignoring it didn’t work. This stubborn furniture just refused to leave on its own.  And I could blame the furniture, but lots of other couches, drapes, dishes and knick-knacks seemed to move themselves around that first couple of years after my divorce.  There was a reason this oak table and hutch stayed around.  Perhaps it was to taunt me with its brass accents and knobs, or maybe it was waiting for me to grow up a little and see that something valid and worthy was still there.  I just needed to see it for myself.

One day I started to paint the hutch.  I bought some fancy paint that updates old furniture and I found myself laying down a sheet on my living room floor, taking off the glass doors one at a time without a large plan of what I really intended to do.  My newlywed husband sanded some spots for me and I bought a few new accessories and got rid of some old stuff.  When all of it had dried and set, I watched as my husband and my son lifted it back into place and put the doors back on together, and something warm in my heart creeped up on me.  

Salvation. 

Salvation is that thing that redeems us as it lifts us out of what we see that is old and ugly in our lives and reminds us of the purpose it did and continues to have.  The most amazing part of it all is that we don’t have to do anything but receive it and know that it is a gift from a God that loves every part of us just as we are.  

That table, the hutch, my heart, my memories and my outlook to my future was salvaged that day, and I give thanks to a God who patiently waited for me to recognize that option all along.

We sit at that table now as a blended family of six, and we pray together, we eat together, we play board games, the children often stand on the chairs and dance at least one time throughout our family meal. We have awful manners, but no longer does that room look and feel like a shrine of something that is old and sad.  It is alive.  

While it still holds a resemblance of what it once was, I no longer find it ugly.  I even like that it still reminds me of what it once looked like as it warmly welcomes me into the opportunity of a hopeful future.  It has become a piece of my salvation.  It is a reminder of the continued beauty that comes out of God’s grace, and the opportunity that God gives us to always, always … always be redeemed no matter how ugly and worthless things seem.

Written by:  Pastor Kelle Nelson, St. Paul Lutheran Church (Portland, Oregon)