When I eat lunch, I don’t like to use plastic forks and throw them away. So I found an old silver fork, stuffed in the back of a drawer and unused for years. It was one of a kind, almost black with years of tarnish.
After I ate lunch, I rinsed off that old fork and put it where I could use it every day.
One afternoon, my husband came to work. He saw my dirty lunch bowl, so I asked him to take it home. He also took the old tarnished silver fork.
At home that night, I discovered that my husband had washed the fork and also polished it. It no longer looked like the same fork. No longer dark, dull and ugly. It was bright, shiny and beautiful. 
But the fact is, it was the very same fork I’d been using all along. The only difference was that now the years of tarnish and grime were gone.
God has made us as valuable as silver. But we become tarnished over time and begin to look unlike who we really are. Like my fork, we’re lost in the back of a mess, and when people see us they think we are worthless and dirty.
So we try to stay hidden and out of sight. But God knows where we are. He brings us out and removes the tarnish from our lives so we can look and act like our true, authentic selves.
As silver needs to have its tarnish removed more than once, so the Lord cleanses us each day as we come to him in humility.
The best part of the fork story happened when the tarnish was removed. Then I clearly saw the name of the silver pattern on the back of the fork – Eternally Yours.
2013 GateWay of Hope Ministries – Deborah Simon, Executive Director