Every once in a while I run into the “crazy Christians”. You know, the type that uses some form of Christianese in literally every sentence and can’t stop talking about the divine providence of God and may even drop words like thou and thee in normal conversation like a King James Bible. I can’t help but laugh every time I run into one of these people because I can’t shake the image of Ned Flanders from my mind. I know that’s how much of the world sees all of us, but we can’t be that bad. Right?
Anyway, meeting Juanita was vaguely reminiscent of my hours after school with The Simpsons, but after I shook that initial picture and was able to listen to the message of what she was saying, I was amazed. I remember passing the sign for Juanita’s Junk Shop every now and then when I would drive around town, and thought there must be gold in that store somewhere. But, even after all these years, I never ventured in. With all my time in Tuscaloosa, I was finally able to meet the Juanita that owned this junk shop. She was working at a relief tent, and when I turned to look for her sign across the street, she said, “Oh baby, you’re not gonna find the store anymore. That storm took it with it, but we’re all still here.”
Juanita quickly went into why she went into the junk business and how God had given her a blessing in the form of the picture of her business. She went on to tell me how God was in the junk business. He looks for what we would consider junk, and he polishes it up and turns it into treasure. No matter how pretty or valuable we try to make ourselves, apart from God, our worth is equal to that of most of the junk in Juanita’s store. Nothing in her store was worth a penny, but when she picked it up out of the trash, cleaned it up, and put a price tag on it, all of a sudden, it was worth something to the average shopper. Disclaimer: This doesn’t mean that God is looking to sell us, it just means He values us enough to make us worth something.
I asked her how she was doing with her shop being gone, and she gave an excellent answer. Juanita told me that in a matter of 30 minutes, most of what Tuscaloosa valued became junk because of this storm. We could either choose to kick our former treasures and think our lives are junk, or we can set our sights on the things that are truly valuable and rebuild around those things. This is coming from a lady that not only lost a huge portion of her house, but also lost her sole form of income. I guess when you’re in the junk business, everything looks like it has potential.
For the rest of the day, I tried to look at the junk around us as valuable tools that have potential. Some of this was as little as finding an old tarp to weather-proof a roof, to digging out the nails in the old shingles to tack it down. The bigger things were the people that we tried to remind that their worth was never in their stuff, but it was in them. I know this can be hard to hear when your house is destroyed, but hopefully seeing the people surrounding them showed them that they were worth it. My main purpose for helping, and Juanita helped me reshift my focus, is not to do good works, but to show everyone they’re worth any second I have. In a nation consumed by timeliness and speed, our personal time is the one thing that we all have the same amount of, and once it’s spent, we can never get it back.
Yeah, we’re all junk. But I love when I can show people they’re worth the one thing I can never get reimbursed for: my time.
