“He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.”
      — Psalm 40:2

Thirty years ago, back in Texas, life was a whirlwind of moving boxes and broken promises. I was living with an alcoholic, and in a single year, we moved fourteen times. When rent money gets swallowed up by addiction, you don’t get to stay long. I wasn’t the one drinking, but I was caught in the wake of the storm. It was a dark, chaotic time, filled with uncertainty, instability, and the constant, heavy weight of survival.

In the backyard of one of those rental houses, half-buried in the dirt, sat a heavy iron skillet.

She had likely been thrown out the back door in a flash of someone else’s rage—a discarded weapon of a household in turmoil. Rain, mud, and rust had taken over. She was battered, heavy, and completely forgotten.

I didn’t have money in my pocket back then, but I had hands willing to work. I dug her out of the mud, brought her inside, and began the long, patient work of restoring her.

Restoring cast iron takes effort. You have to scrub away the grit of the past, coat it in oil, and put it through the fire over and over again. Slowly, layer by layer, the rough, rusted metal turns smooth, dark, and strong. What was once ruined becomes refined.

That iron skillet has been with me ever since.

She made the long journey with me out of the noise and upheaval of Texas and into the quiet peace of Tennessee. Today, thirty years later, she doesn’t live in the dirt. She sits on my stove in a safe, loving, stable home. This morning, she’s baking a fresh batch of golden cornbread. She has cooked countless eggs, nourished my family, and witnessed decades of quiet grace around my kitchen table.

Our lives often mirror that cast iron skillet.

We can find ourselves dropped into circumstances we didn’t choose, buried under the heavy mud of other people’s choices, or battered by seasons of pure chaos. We might feel discarded, rusted over, or permanently scarred by the heat of the fires we’ve walked through.

But God is a Master of restoration.

He doesn’t leave us in the backyard mud. He picks us up, scrubs away the dirt of our past, and seasons us with His mercy layer by layer. The fires that threatened to break us are the very things He uses to build endurance within us.
What was once thrown in anger can be redeemed to nourish others. What was once homeless can be brought into a place of deep, lasting peace.

A Reflection for Today:
Where in your life do you feel worn down by past storms? Take heart today knowing that in the hands of the Redeemer, your story isn’t over when you’re in the mud—it’s just where the restoration begins.