The divine passion for restoring value
Somewhere on a beach near Marseille, there is a tabernacle door with a story.
It was first a tree — somewhere, no one remembers where. Then perhaps a boat, or a house, or simply wood forgotten on the water. The storms rolled it, the sea salted it, time wore it down. And one day, this exhausted wood washed up on the sand.
That is where an artist saw it. Not as waste. Not as a problem to solve. As a precious material, shaped by hardship, ready to bear something beautiful.
“I have a passion for restoring value to what no longer has any.”
— The artist
I do not know what you are carrying right now. Perhaps a story you cannot tell because it has rolled you, salted you, damaged you so much. Perhaps a sense of having missed something essential, of having arrived too late, too broken, too worn to still be useful.
What if that is precisely where the story begins?
Jesus had this same passion. He was not looking for forest timber — for those who grew up straight, in favorable conditions. He was looking for the wrecks. The lost. Those whom no one was looking at anymore. And He placed in their hands a beauty they could never have imagined for themselves.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)
What the sea has damaged in you, God does not make into a list of your faults. He makes it into a door.