Tarnished Isn't Damaged

What looks damaged may only be tarnished. In this Sunday Seed, Charlotte shares a childhood memory of polishing family silver and explores the difference between what life leaves on us and who we actually are. Because what we see on the surface, in ourselves or in someone else, is rarely the whole story.

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Hey, friend. Welcome to Sunday Seed. I'm Charlotte Edwards, and I believe small seeds create big impact. Each week, we'll plant one. Let's dig in Growing up, there were a few chores I hated more than polishing silver. Before holidays, my mom and grandmother thought my sister and I needed something fun to do, and so out came the silver polish. I hated it. You'd rub and you'd rub, and your hands would get filthy. The cloth would turn black, and just when you thought you were finished, you'd turn over the piece and realize that you'd missed an entire section. It was not my idea of a good time. Which makes it a little more ironic that when I got married, I was fortunate enough to receive beautiful silver of my own, and over the years I've also been given pieces that belonged to my grandparents, and I treasure them. But I guess I don't treasure them enough to polish them, because recently I pulled out some of that silver and it was bad. I'm not talking a little dull. Some of it was so dark and tarnished that you didn't even know what was underneath, you might think it was beyond saving I got out the polish and started working. And as I rubbed, the black started coming off. Some of the pieces cleaned up pretty quickly. Others required a whole lot more elbow grease. The tarnish had worked its way into the little grooves and details, and those areas took a lot more work. And a couple times I got tired of messing with it and put the pieces down and came back to it later. But underneath all that tarnish was the same silver that had been there all along, and that's the important difference between something being tarnished and something being damaged. Tarnish changes the way something looks. It can cover up the shine. It can build slowly enough that you don't even notice how much has accumulated But it doesn't change what the silver is. And I think we forget that about people. Life affects us. Of course it does. We go through hard seasons. People hurt us. We make mistakes. Things don't turn out the way we thought they would, and some experiences stay with us longer than others. But what happens to us doesn't automatically get to define us. There's a difference between saying, "I failed at something," and letting failure become the way you see yourself. We can be just as quick to do that to other people. We meet someone in a hard season, see the rough edges or the guardedness and decide that's who they are. Sometimes we know one chapter of someone's story and act like we've read the whole book. We haven't. What we're seeing may be real. Tarnish is real. I have the black cloth and the sore arms to prove it. But what's visible isn't always the whole story. And that's what I love about the old silver. Those pieces were valuable when I pulled them out of the cabinet, completely tarnished. They were valuable when I was scrubbing them, and they were valuable when I put them back in clean and shiny. The polishing didn't give them their value back. Their value had never left. It just became easier to see. And I think that's worth remembering both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see each other. Tarnish isn't damaged. there's a lot more underneath than what we can see from the surface That's your seed. Now go plant something good