The Maker Movement

You gotta love this guy; his name is Mr. Jalopy. His credo is this: "If it is broke, DO fix it." He sits in his workshop surrounded by thousands of nuts, bolts, washers, springs, hand tools, and gizmos. If there were such a place as nirvana, this might be what it looks like. He started the Maker Movement to unite men with a simple idea: transform something nearly obsolete into something useful. For example, one member of the Maker Movement took a VCR and made an automated cat feeder. We can only hope for a self-cleaning litter box made from a junk DVD player is soon to follow.

Mr. Jalopy repairs, invents, and is so far out of the box he can't see it anymore. Some of his more interesting creations include a gorilla drive-in theater made from a light bulb, old bookshelves, junky electrical parts, a kitchen table, and an adult-sized tricycle. Now he can wheel up to any building and watch a movie. Perhaps his coolest invention is a large iPod made from a small iPod connected to a large family radio and a stereo.

His Maker Movement captures the imagination of every little boy who ever created a spaceship from a cardboard box, a drag racer from a crate, or a fort from a blanket over a table. We guys like to tinker, take things apart and make something better. We invent and imagine. We can take stuff and find new uses, combine unrelated parts and make things better. So what if you have some extra parts after the repair-obviously, they weren't needed to begin with. We all have one thing in common though; we use stuff to make other stuff.

Mr. Jalopy can do some pretty creative things, but he's got stuff to work with. Where he gets the stuff, I'm not exactly sure, but it comes from somewhere, and ultimately, it came from somewhere on this planet. Like everything around us, the earth is full of made stuff. The earth itself, however, was made out of nothing.

Compared to many, Mr. Jalopy is pretty creative, but in the bigger scheme of things, he's got nothing compared to the "Maker": the one who created the universe-the heavens and the earth-out of nothing. That one is God the Father, and what an awesome Maker He is.

What would you make if you could?