Uncovering the Original

In 1978, restorers began the painstaking work of saving Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper in Milan. The masterpiece had been crumbling for centuries — damaged by humidity, a Napoleonic army that used the room as a stable, and a World War II bombing that destroyed three walls of the refectory while the painting somehow survived. But perhaps the worst damage came from well-meaning restorers who, over the centuries, painted over Leonardo's original work with their own clumsy brushstrokes, burying his genius beneath layers of inferior imitation.

For twenty-one years, a team of specialists worked inch by inch, using microscopes and surgical scalpels to peel away those false layers. They were not adding anything new. They were uncovering what had always been there — Leonardo's original hand, his original colors, his original intention for the work.

This is what God does with a human soul. Sin, shame, and the damage of living in a broken world pile up like centuries of grime and overpainting. We even try our own repairs — coping mechanisms, false selves, masks we wear — and these amateur restorations often cover the original design more than they help.

But the Master Restorer does not start over. He does not discard us and begin with a blank wall. With infinite patience, He removes what does not belong, layer by layer, until the person He always intended begins to emerge.

You were not ruined beyond recognition. You were buried beneath what was never supposed to be there. And God is still uncovering His original masterpiece.