The Luthier on Elm Street

In a cluttered workshop on Elm Street in Portland, Oregon, a luthier named Marco Benedetti spends his days with instruments other repair shops would refuse. Violins with cracked soundboards. Cellos warped by flood damage. A viola found abandoned behind a middle school dumpster.

Marco never rushes. He holds each instrument the way you would hold a bird with a broken wing — firm enough to steady it, gentle enough not to crush what remains. He once spent four months restoring a water-damaged violin that an insurance adjuster had written off as worthless. When it finally sang again, a twelve-year-old girl who could not afford a new instrument pressed it to her chest and wept.

"Most people look at a crack and see garbage," Marco says. "I look at a crack and see where the music is waiting to come back."

Isaiah tells us that God's Chosen Servant operates the same way. He does not shout or make a spectacle. He picks up what the world has discarded — the bruised reed, the flickering wick — and with patient, steady hands, He restores. Where others see someone too damaged to bother with, the Servant sees exactly where the music is waiting to return. Justice, in God's economy, does not arrive with a battering ram. It arrives with hands gentle enough to mend what everyone else threw away.