A brand-new Porsche built from plans from 1959: Innovation and your enduring value

Benjamin Clymer is a company founder and CEO. He loves
things that are handmade for specific clients. You can tell because he drives a
car built specifically for him.

His “new” car is a 1959 Porsche 356 Zagato Coupe.
Porsche had the plans since the late 1950s but had never built the car. They
spent three years creating his unique vehicle: they used a 1959 Porsche 356
engine, transmission, and chassis, but they crafted the body by hand and then
fitted the car to Benjamin’s taste.

As a result, he has a new car that was built from 1959 plans and parts.

The Wall Street Journal article caught my eye
because, like Benjamin Clymer, I have a fascination with vintage cars. I have
never spent what I presume he spent for his Porsche, but I have appreciated
classic cars just the same.

Over the years, I owned a 1967 Mercury Cougar, 1966 Ford
Mustang Coupe, and 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback. When we moved to Atlanta in
1994, our sons were of such an age and driving in that city was of such a
nature that my Mustang Fastback was no longer appropriate.

I have driven age-and-lifestyle-appropriate cars ever since,
but I still miss my Fastback. I watch car auctions on television when I get the
chance and imagine myself driving what these collectors collect.

Innovation and your enduring value

There’s a theological point to my automotive reminiscing:
Like Benjamin Clymer’s new old car, you and I were built from designs that
predated us. Not by sixty years, but by the entirety of human history to the
point of our conception.

Also like his Porsche, you and I are unique. There is no one
else in the world precisely like you. God did not create you because the world
needed another person to add to the billions of us on this tiny planet. He made
you because he wanted someone precisely like you.

This is a fact worth remembering in a secularized culture
that tries to force us into its mold of conventional wisdom and popular
morality. When we…