Years ago, in the pre-kids era, I spent several weekends re-finishing a crib. The crib was not special in any notable way, except that it was left in my house from the previous owners. I held onto it for years, hoping to someday fix it up …
The purchase of my house was an adventure. It was a foreclosure and every stigma with that type of distressed property applied. The house truly told a sad story, revealing the aftermath of a turmoil-filled season. The previous owners had literally left in the middle of the night. Food, furniture, and personal “stuff” were left behind. The place was disgusting, and we hauled out a ton (actually it was a ton and a half) of junk to the dump.
But most disgusting were the clues that seemed to indicate why the previous owners had lost their house. My crew and I found thousands of lottery tickets, and amazingly most of them seemed to be from that year. Surely, that money could have paid the mortgage payments. We found pornography, liquor, requests from family members for bail money, and all sorts of other wild stuff—even the remnants of what seemed to be a business scam. We found love letters, toys, and even one of the children’s school pictures. It just wasn’t right that some of these precious items were abandoned in the house to become trash.
After sifting through the carnage for days, an unusual item stuck out at me. It was a baby’s crib. (Keep in mind, I was 24, I wasn’t married, let alone having kids, let alone needing a crib. In fact, I wasn’t even close to having a girlfriend, let alone a wife, let alone a family. Heck, I lived in my parents’ basement, and I was excited about this house becoming my bachelor pad).
But for some reason, I decided to put the unassembled crib behind the tool bench, with hopes of refinishing it and some day using it for my own. If I could someday turn the crib into a place of comfort and rest for my child, it would somehow redeem a small part of the sad story behind the house’s previous owners. I couldn’t change what had happened to those kids’ lives and the turmoil that seemed to surround their family’s circumstances, but I could take a remnant, an old crib, and make it part of my home—and I was determined that my home would one day be a place of refuge for my children.
Thankfully, God is all about redemption. God is all about taking the junk from our past and making us into new creations. God is all about overcoming evil with good. “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, with the precious blood of Christ” (I Peter 1:18-19). How great to be redeemed from an empty way of life!
Money problems? Addictions? Broken childhoods? An empty life? Happy memories abandoned in despair? God has a way of redeeming those. God has a way of taking those horrible things and making something good out of them. Redemption is his specialty.
How big is your God? How big is your vision? Where is the crib in your life? What needs God’s redemptive work? Where is God calling you to bring in his redemptive work? Where can you take Satan’s evil chaos, stop it, and restore it with God’s peace? If God can redeem cribs and houses, how much more our lives! “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new is here!” (II Corinthians 5:17). Christ is our Redeemer. He is making us new.