Catching up on this website this morning felt like cleaning out a forgotten closet. After more than two weeks away, I was back to copying my daily Facebook posts over there, a simple multi-step routine I now run mostly on autopilot.
As I worked, my mind wandered back over all the other websites I’ve built to share my stories through the years. I poured countless hours and, quite literally, my heart and soul into projects that almost no one ever saw, then I would look back and think, “What a waste.”
Back in the classroom, I used to teach about efficiency with a bag of unshelled walnuts. Most of my students had only ever seen walnuts that were already shelled, so I would crack one, pass around the meat, and point to the shells on the table: “What do we do with these?” The answer was always the same—throw them away.
Then I would pull out a bottle of my wife’s apricot face scrub and read an ingredient they had never noticed: Juglans regia shell powder—finely ground walnut shells used as an exfoliant in personal care products. What they were ready to sweep into the trash had real value in someone else’s hands.
To push the lesson further, I sometimes turned to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, his 1906 expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry. He described plants so determined to eliminate waste that spoiled meat, scraps, and even filth were reworked and sold as “fresh” products—meatpacking plants quietly passing off their toxic recipes as suitable for the public’s breakfast, all in the name of squeezing every bit of efficiency out of what they had.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that God truly never wastes anything in the lives of his children. Romans 8:28 promises that he works all things together for the good of those who love him, not just the wins that look good on a résumé, but also the choices that were the spiritual equivalent of moldy, spoiled meat covered in rat droppings. Looking back, most of us know—if we are honest—that we’ve learned far more from our abject failures than from our smoothest victories.
In my case, a surprising amount of what I know about technology and writing came from those very websites and projects I once wrote off as useless. I have a long history of kicking myself for mistakes I didn’t even know were mistakes at the time; from this side, it looks much more like a classroom where God quietly schooled me through experiments that didn’t “work” the way I wanted, but prepared me for what I’m doing now.
As an economics teacher and the son of a hard‑boiled Depression‑era father, I still feel the pull toward getting it right the first time and eliminating every bit of waste. The road through life, though, comes with speed bumps built in.
The good news is that God’s economy is not like a heartless meatpacking plant, nor is it a world where unused effort gets shoveled into the furnace. In his hands, even the worst fragments—our biggest mistakes, most shameful episodes, and seemingly wasted efforts—are repurposed to scrape away pride, teach patience, and form a quieter, deeper trust.
In classroom economics, it had to be admitted that nothing in this world can be completely efficient, but in Christ’s kingdom nothing is ever pointless either.
. . . and that’s what I know today.