When my mother-in-law in Alabama moved to a nursing home here in eastern Kentucky, we had to go through her stuff. Her two sons, two stepdaughters, plus some other family members had to decide what went where. We found she was a collector of many things. Three storage sheds were filled to the brim. She had SO many treasures.

It’s a difficult task to sort and divide a lifetime of keepsakes. It went well, with each offspring taking turns choosing mementos. Among other things, my beloved inherited his mother’s cast iron skillet she’d used for decades. Biscuits, pone bread, cornbread, and dressing had been lovingly prepared and baked in the sturdy pan. It held many delicious memories.

We passed the nearly ancient cast iron skillet to our daughter when she got her own apartment. Just barely starting to cook, she was still too young to grasp the value of the treasure she had been given. She stuck it in the kitchen cabinet under the sink figuring she would probably use it someday.

Time passed.

A few months ago, our girl came across the old skillet in the cabinet. Kitchen sinks often drip; hers did, too. The once priceless cooking pan was now filled with rust. She knew it was important because it had been her grandmother’s, but didn’t want to tell us what had happened.

So, she threw it away.

We gasped when we heard. Of course, too much time had gone by and there was no way to get it back. Our daughter didn’t realize that a rusty skillet could be fixed, that there were ways to restore it. The pan seemed destroyed, beyond repair…bound for the garbage.

Too often, people can feel irreparable, fit only for the trash. Mistakes or poor choices are made, the damage seems too hard to get past. The devil does his work trying to steal, kill, and destroy, planting and fertilizing lies that we’ve have gone too far or messed up too much to turn to the Lord. Or be loved by the Lord. One of his most often used tricks is renting space in our heads. “It’s over this time. You’ve gone too far. There is no help for you,” he whispers. It’s simply not true. The best stories in the Bible are when prodigals come home, the dead raised, the unclean restored.

In Luke 8, we can read of one real-life man who seemed unfixable. He was rubbish to the community, living at the cemetery. He had no hope, no worth, no value. But Jesus. Jesus saw him. Jesus had come through a storm to reach him! Jesus cared about him. Jesus healed him. Finally, Jesus commissioned him – to go tell others his story of restoration. Shew and praise the Lord!

An old song by Phillips, Craig, and Dean from 1993 comes to mind: “He Believes in Lost Causes.” Oh, yes. Yes, He does!