When I look back at my twenties and thirties, I don’t see a guy I’m proud of; I see a fuse that was always lit.
People who only know me now—a quiet guy in his early sixties who fixes old lawnmowers and drinks too much black coffee—think I’ve always been steady. But they didn’t know the version of Arthur who wrecked a marriage, walked out on loved ones, and spent three years behind razor wire. My hands are scarred from bar fights and punches I threw when my mouth wrote checks my soul couldn’t cash. For a long time, I thought God wouldn’t touch trash like that.
God broke me on a Tuesday afternoon in a cell. No dramatic lightning strike, just the heavy silence of realizing I had ruined everything. I sat on that metal bunk and wept until my ribs ached, hating myself. That absolute bottom is where He got my attention—not with a booming voice, but like someone sitting down in the dirt beside me in the dark to say, “All right. Now that you’re done pretending, let’s talk”.
Finding God wasn’t a peaceful walk in a meadow; it felt like surgery without anesthesia, meaning every ugly, selfish piece of myself had to die.
Nowadays, I spend my time in the garage restoring rusted tools. People ask why I spend hours fixing $20 Walmart junk, but they don’t get it. I look at those tools and see myself—the rust, the deep gouges, and what it takes to put a piece of steel back in the fire, beat it straight on an anvil, and grind away the decay until it cuts again.
When I’m out there sweating, I talk to Him out loud like He’s standing right beside the workbench. “Look at this mess, Lord,” I’ll mutter, holding up a pitted old hatchet head, “Reminds me of my temper”. And I can feel Him right there in the dust and WD-40, reminding me that He didn’t throw me out when I was broken. He took the ruined pieces of my life, put them back in the fire, and made something useful out of the wreckage.
I’m still rough around the edges, but every time I strike a spark off that old grinder, I’m thanking Him for not giving up on a hard-headed sinner in the dark!
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