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Tarnished Isn't Damaged · The Seed Project

• 0:01
  Hey, friend.
• 0:02
  Welcome to Sunday Seed.
• 0:03
  I'm Charlotte Edwards, and I believe small seeds create big impact.
• 0:08
  Each week, we'll plant one.
• 0:10
  Let's dig in Growing up, there were a few chores I hated more than polishing silver.
• 0:19
  Before holidays, my mom and grandmother thought my sister and I needed something fun to do, and so out came the silver polish.
• 0:27
  I hated it.
• 0:28
  You'd rub and you'd rub, and your hands would get filthy.
• 0:32
  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.
• 0:40
  It was not my idea of a good time.
• 0:43
  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.
• 0:56
  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.
• 1:03
  I'm not talking a little dull.
• 1:05
  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.
• 1:15
  And as I rubbed, the black started coming off.
• 1:18
  Some of the pieces cleaned up pretty quickly.
• 1:21
  Others required a whole lot more elbow grease.
• 1:24
  The tarnish had worked its way into the little grooves and details, and those areas took a lot more work.
• 1:30
  And a couple times I got tired of messing with it and put the pieces down and came back to it later.
• 1:37
  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.
• 1:48
  Tarnish changes the way something looks.
• 1:51
  It can cover up the shine.
• 1:53
  It can build slowly enough that you don't even notice how much has accumulated But it doesn't change what the silver is.
• 2:02
  And I think we forget that about people.
• 2:04
  Life affects us.
• 2:05
  Of course it does.
• 2:07
  We go through hard seasons.
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  People hurt us.
• 2:09
  We make mistakes.
• 2:11
  Things don't turn out the way we thought they would, and some experiences stay with us longer than others.
• 2:17
  But what happens to us doesn't automatically get to define us.
• 2:22
  There's a difference between saying,"I failed at something," and letting failure become the way you see yourself.
• 2:29
  We can be just as quick to do that to other people.
• 2:32
  We meet someone in a hard season, see the rough edges or the guardedness and decide that's who they are.
• 2:39
  Sometimes we know one chapter of someone's story and act like we've read the whole book.
• 2:44
  We haven't.
• 2:46
  What we're seeing may be real.
• 2:47
  Tarnish is real.
• 2:49
  I have the black cloth and the sore arms to prove it.
• 2:53
  But what's visible isn't always the whole story.
• 2:56
  And that's what I love about the old silver.
• 2:59
  Those pieces were valuable when I pulled them out of the cabinet, completely tarnished.
• 3:04
  They were valuable when I was scrubbing them, and they were valuable when I put them back in clean and shiny.
• 3:11
  The polishing didn't give them their value back.
• 3:14
  Their value had never left.
• 3:16
  It just became easier to see.
• 3:19
  And I think that's worth remembering both in the way we see ourselves and in the way we see each other.
• 3:25
  Tarnish isn't damaged.
• 3:27
  there's a lot more underneath than what we can see from the surface That's your seed.
• 3:33
  Now go plant something good