Second-hand Potential

by Zeke Flores

I don't like waste.

I try to use up everything I buy until it’s run into the ground. Only when I’m sure I can’t get any more use out of it will I discard it. That goes a long way towards explaining why my garage looks the way it does; it’s full of stuff I won’t throw away!

I think I must get that trait from my dad. When I was a kid, I remember one of his favorite hangouts was a second-hand store owned by a friend of his. Most mornings he’d go to the store to have coffee with his friend and some days I was lucky enough to tag along. The store was an old, cavernous building chock-full of used items of every sort. To my nine-year-old self, it was a treasure trove of wonders waiting to be explored, and sometimes Dad’s friend would let me take home a used toy or comic book. To this day, I buy used second (or third) hand items if I think they’ve still got some life left.

But there's another Father I know who also favors used items with life still in them. You see, God doesn’t like waste either. He created us for a special purpose and equipped us with everything we needed to achieve it. He wants willing fellowship, so He created us with wills of our own and emotions we can choose to direct toward His purpose. He wants a well-informed family, so He prepared His will for us in a way that we can understand, using the intellect He instilled in us. But you know the story. From the beginning, man has perverted his purpose and squandered his life in pursuit of selfish desires that take away from his sacred role. Delighted by the devil’s shiny baubles, man follows that fatal attraction until he’s spent. Then, there he ends up; all used up and seemingly drained of any life or use left in him.

But God sees it differently. Instead of seeing a used-up thing, He sees His creation with life and usefulness, an untapped potential of sacred purpose. He takes what the devil has used up and re-creates us, intending to have us fulfill His honorable intention. And when you look at the lives of people He has changed, and the service to their new Owner they provide, you can see that indeed, there was a lot of life and use left in them after all.
So, in a way, you might say that God is in the second-hand business. He takes what seems all used up and fits it for a new and better life because, you see, He doesn’t like waste either.

"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come" (II Corinthians 5:17).