It is possible for God to take a second best (or a sixty-fourth best!) and make it into something very wonderful when it is accepted as being the present condition in which a man finds himself, and when he moves toward God to develop it to the fullness of its possibilities in blessing and submission to His will, there cannot fail to be a great blessing. One of the glories of God in Christ is that He is able to make music from bruised reeds, and set smoking flax on fire (Matthew 12.20).

Donald Grey Barnhouse, The Invisible War, p. 192