gaping hole, several feet wide from bow to stern, scarred the side of the nearly block-long ship.

"What happened?" author Dean Merrill asked the friend who had brought him to this Lake Michigan port.

"Just an overhaul to enlarge capacity," the friend replied, nodding toward workers who scrambled about the sliced freighter. "They cut the thing right through the middle, jacked up the top half, and now they're welding pieces to fill the space. When they're done, that ship will carry almost twice as much cargo as before."

Fascinated, Merrill recounts in The God Who Won't Let Go (1998, Zondervan), he could not help but think how "human beings get ripped apart as well." He thought of the man who had stepped outside his marriage or betrayed a friend's secret, the woman who bore an illegitimate child or mishandled corporate funds, all the people who made undeniable mistakes or whose future seemed torpedoed by a single fateful act. "They become bigger people in the end," he realized. "The painful surgery has enlarged their capacity to serve."

It shouldn't be so surprising, Merrill writes: "God is King of the Humpty-Dumpties, the One Who puts broken people back together again."

If God can rescue us from a painful--even shameful--past, He certainly can use that transformation story to bring others to Himself. In fact, it is often our open, truthful sharing of past mistakes that makes our story more credible to someone who does not know God personally. In that way, God can redeem the pain and mistakes of our past and use them for His purposes.

Mel Goebel, Cheryle Holt and Scott Tunsel all tell how they're amazed by the ways God is using their Humpty-Dumpty faith to win new hearts. For years all they shared was a common, life-shattering lack of hope. But because of that something more--an enlarged capacity to serve--they have the ability to be heard and received by people in pain.

Scott Tunsel had lived the American dream. At 29 he bought his first Lexus, at 34 a $250,000 home, and at 37 a new sailboat and beach house on the San Juan Islands--all on credit and with loans.

His job as the vice president of computer programming for a growing Seattle technical corporation paid him prestige and big benefits. Scott banked on both every day. He dined at fine restaurants with company moguls, took out loans for a growing portfolio of properties, and ran up credit card debts on cross-country vacations, $300 Italian leather shoes and $100 haircuts.

His debts grew larger than his paycheck, but Scott couldn't stop spending. It gave him the status and power he'd never felt as a shy, teen-ager whose parents and classmates said he'd never amount to anything.

The first time Scott couldn't make a payment on the Lexus, he wasn't too worried. He'd make it up next month. When a charge for a $75 dinner was declined on one card, he put it on another. But, six months later, Scott's sailboat was repossessed, the bank foreclosed on the beach house and his dozen credit cards were maxed.

Overnight, he was back to a tiny apartment in a blue-collar neighborhood, eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch at his desk. He sank into depression, feeling like that rejected kid again who would never fit in--and now, with all this debt, would never possess anything but daily drudgery.

"Your life can be rich even as you're drowning in debt," Scott's assistant, Jan, reassured when he asked her to stave off creditors' calls to the office.

"Oh yeah?" he replied, acting disinterested, but wondering about her secret to success. Though she didn't live in his exclusive neighbor-hood and was navigating her own financial woes to attend night school, Jan seemed to manage. "How do you do it?" he finally asked.

"With a lot of prayer!" she said casually, laughing. She told how she, too, had run into debt and was consulting a Christian credit counselor. "His service is free," she explained. "It's his ministry."

Scott wasn't so sure what ministry was, but he could use any free help to get his affairs in order. He asked for the counselor's number.

Jan had a better idea. "Come with me to my next appointment," she said. "I'll introduce you, and you can see how this guy's helping me dig out."

"Maybe I ought to check out your church, too," Scott said, jesting only in part. Deep down he wanted to believe his life meant something--that with or without money and the finest material goods, his future had a prayer.

On an embankment above Nashville's Guest House, where the homeless, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics check in to clean up, Cheryle Holt stood nursing her broken hand. She'd been in another street fight. Her head and fingers throbbed. She was penniless, hungry, cold.

She watched the 100 or so other folks milling about the icy parking lot below. When you're homeless all you've got is time. But, feeling more sick, tired and depressed than ever, Cheryle feared hers was running out.
She thought about the path that had brought her to this desperate place. All she'd ever wanted was adventure and love but, disappointed by both, she constantly tried to numb her feelings and dreams with fast highs, hard liquor and quick sex for money. The result these last 24 years was three stays in the state penitentiary for attempted murder, possessing heroin and prostitution. Social Services took her firstborn son as she worked the streets; she gave the second son to parents who were already caring for the child of a street acquaintance. Stabbed 13 times and regularly beaten while working the streets, Cheryle drifted from hotel rooms to alley corners and finally to Addiction Row. It was there that she was arrested for the 231st time.

In a separate jail unit for people with addictions Cheryle was approach-ed by well-meaning Christians. "God loves you. He can save you," she was told, but she scoffed at the idea. One woman was insistent that Cheryle needed to accept God's forgiveness and be baptized. Cheryle rebuked her, and the women broke out in tears, not from fear, but love.

"It moved me that someone I didn't even know could care so much to cry over me," Cheryle says. "I got baptized more for her than for myself. I still didn't believe God could forgive me for all I'd done."

She told an inmate about the experience and in the telling--the first time she'd recounted one of her most troubling experiences--began to sense God's forgiveness. He wasn't letting Cheryle go.

Maybe He really does love me, she wondered. Maybe He is saving me. Unsure, she decided to try to save herself. At 41, she applied for a Social Security number, entered Chances, a program for people working through addiction, and with the help of several 12-step programs became the first resident of Magdalene House, a recovery home for former prostitutes battling addiction and piecing together new lives.

But the consequences of 24 lost years were difficult. Hoping for a quick high to ease the pain of her past as she worked on her GED, Cheryle instead found herself back into drugs and on the streets. This time nothing numbed the shame and hopelessness she felt. She found that it hurt more to lose something good than to miss what she'd never had.

Now she stood on the embankment above the Guest House where she cried out to God: "I've messed up. I'm so messed up. Help me start over." Her heart broke for herself and people she saw wandering about the parking lot below.

"And God?" she added. "If I'm not beyond help I want to show these people they're not either."

As a scared and confused boy, one of two sets of twins in a family of seven children, Mel Goebel had never really experienced love in action. He'd witnessed his mother's fickle affairs. He'd watched his drunken, angry father slam her head to the floor with the butt of a shotgun. He longed for what kids in other families seemed to have: love, encouragement, a chance.

When those things are absent in your life it's too painful to be around those who have them in spades, Mel says.

So by the time he met a new inmate in a Lincoln, Nebraska, prison, Mel's fear and confusion had left him a dropout, drug abuser and inmate in the state penitentiary with a three-year term on a drug-related burglary charge.

Mel watched the new guy enter the yard. He carried the usual stack--pillow, blanket and, on top, something different: a big, black Bible.
"You believe in God?" taunted Mel, then 21. His sarcasm was intentional. God hadn't saved his mom from abuse, or kept him from addiction. God didn't seem to be around when he left school in eighth grade. And where was God, he wondered, when I landed behind these bars? He laughed meanly, prodding again, "You think God can save you?"

"Yes," the new inmate answered quietly and with such boldness Mel could only sit back in silence.

The guy told Mel about the freedom he found in Jesus, how he'd just learned the gospel from the girl he'd been dating. He'd only just become a Christian before his incarceration.

This Bible man was weird, Mel decided. Still he couldn't help but wonder about such bold assurance of a newly-found faith upon entering this forsaken place. Feeling once again like that scared, confused boy, he wondered: Maybe God is real. Maybe He can change things. Secretly, he wanted to know more.

Practical services, a sense of belonging and purpose, the promise of abundant life, a proclamation of faith based on unchanging love--are these the ingredients for effective, cyclical evangelism?

Maybe. They helped Scott, Cheryle and Mel. But something more opened their ears and made them ready to hear the good news of grace to begin with: candidness, vulnerability and honesty.

"The searing honesty of Jesus," Philip Yancey calls it in his best-seller The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan, 1995): "Such up-front truthfulness that made the 'sinless friend of sinners find the good in a groveling tax collector, a Samaritan woman (who had a history of five failed marriages and was currently living with another man), and a thief who would have zero opportunity for spiritual growth.' Jesus made Himself so vulnerable that even on His last night with His disciples 'after they had heard all the claims and seen all the miracles,' one asked, 'Show us the Father.' "

Jesus' humanity and ability to feel frustration ("What do I have to say to you?" "How many times do I have to say it?") make Him, and His astounding grace, real to us. That same humanity makes us real to others.

His counselor's frank introduction made Scott feel accepted, he says. The financial advisor told how working out of his own debt propelled him into his job. He told Scott they'd each made some poor choices and put stock in things instead of God.

"Knowing I wasn't alone erased my fear of amounting to nothing," Scott says. "Although," he adds jokingly, "my creditors remind me I amount to quite a bit!"

As he learned how Jesus paid a debt He never owed--one that no human being could ever pay--Scott began to see how his financial ruin was instead his saving grace. It's a message he now shares in classes he teaches to Fortune 500 groups on how to find your worth in God's eyes, not in a fat bank book, exclusive land deed or trendy shop.

Cheryle Holt has discovered a similar truth. Living rent- and drug-free at Magdalene House gave her the confidence to reinvent her life, she says. Magdalene residents remind one another that God loves them--deeply--for more than their bodies. "Other people could have told me that, but coming from women struggling with my same demons made the difference."

And what a difference, she says. She's stayed clean and sober for three years, won back her firstborn son, finished school to earn her GED and found work as the first receptionist at the homeless shelter where she once took refuge.

Now Cheryle leads weekly talk sessions with people she rounds up from the streets. Along with a co-worker named Harry, she buys, from her own pocket, small cakes and soft drinks for after class. "I would have done anything for such treats when I was on the street," she confides. But her goal is to give those she meets something more lasting. She asks everyone in the circle to share what is their favorite sandwich or other questions to draw out their individuality. She allows folks to see their God-created specialness.

"These are people who have been told they're no good so much they've begun to believe it," she says. So she learns their names and slaps her knee in celebration or pats the backs of people like 71-year-old Tim. A recovering alcoholic, Tim tells about his favorite barbecued pork sandwich, and then asks Cheryle questions about heaven.

"When you get people talking about the good in them, and you recognize it too, you can share how God created that part of them and loves all of them as they are," Cheryle says. "It's so simple, empowering and powerful."

So simple--that may be why it's missed, says Mel. "Satan tries to cloud how we see things. He wants us to believe we're evil or no good, because then we're his.

He's the accuser and real jailer."

It took a new convert's bold admission of needing a Savior to plant that idea in Mel's mind. Now he tries to plant it in others. Since leaving prison to earn his GED, a bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, and founding and franchising a window-washing business in Colorado Springs, Mel's been back behind bars almost once every other month, voluntarily.

He tells inmates that the secret to escaping bondage is to know the God Who has always loved them and always will. His story changes even the way prison guards view their charges. "When l found freedom in Christ," he tells them, "prison became my monastery. I could pray and read my Bible for two to three hours every day, walk the yard with my brothers in Christ and share what God was teaching us. I no longer saw junk and an awful place. I saw hurting people who had no idea of God's love."

That's the key to carrying out Christ's Commission, anyway, Mel says--seeing. It's why he named his business Window King and based it on Matthew 6:22 (to let His work "bring clarity to your vision").

"Our lives need to be about seeing how much God loves us, meets us in our need--and letting others see our mistakes and struggles, not just the victories," he explains.

Call it God-vision, this ability to see beyond ugliness and eagerly imagine great possibilities. God, after all, sees not just the scrambles of a person's life but understands the pain of all falls. Instead of seeing ripped up ships or your average freighter, God eagerly waits to fashion carriers so magnificent they glide through troubled waters and stay afloat in turbulent storms.

Jeanette Thomason is a journalist living in Nashville, Tennessee. She has been the editor of two women's magazines, Aspire and Virtue.