Hey y'all, this is Troy. So I want to tell you all cool story. So I was at church
the other day and I was talking to somebody and realized I didn't have my
phone on me, and so I said, "Hey, I think I left my phone out in the car. I'll have
to text you later whenever I find my phone." I went out to the car
after church with my family and I looked for my phone. I couldn't find it. We drove
home. I looked for my phone at the house. I couldn't find it anywhere, and then
suddenly it dawned on me: the last place I saw my phone was when I was getting in
the car to drive to church that morning. I placed it up on top of our car and I
was thinking, "Oh my gosh. It's probably not there." I ran outside and
checked. It was not on the car, was not in the parking lot or anything, and so what
I did was I got in the car went driving down the road, and I followed the path
from our apartment to our church. So I am driving along, and about halfway
there, I see a piece of my phone sitting out on the road. So I stopped the car,
and I get out, and I go look at it, and I find that my phone is—my phone is in
three pieces, and my phone case is in about five or seven pieces. I am just
thinking, "I can't believe that I've done this. I don't want to have to pay
for a new phone, and I don't want to have to go without my phone for a few days."
Because it is what I use for work, and people have to text and call me and
stuff. But as I begin to scoop all the pieces together, I realize that my case
is destroyed—it is going to just have to be thrown away. The phone is probably a gonner too.
But I get the three pieces of my phone, and I put them back together,
and I hit the power button. I am looking at it, and and I can tell that
the the battery has been driven over for hours. There are scratches and dents.
The front of the phone has all these scratches in it, and places where
it has just been messed up. But after I hit the power button, I notice
that it turns on like normal ,and it powers up, and I was able to text that
person right then that I said I would text. It made me think about the times
when we feel like we have messed up so much that there is no way we could ever
fix what we have done. The times when we feel like our lives are in so many pieces, or
that we have been so trampled on—that people have been running us over.
Whatever it may be—that the situation in our life has been so messed
up that we feel like there is nothing we can do about it, and we just see the
pieces of our life scattered across the road. If you are going through one of
those moments today, the same way that I was looking for my phone—that I saw it
from a distance, because I did not want to lose my phone. That was my phone!
I believe that God sees you from a distance today because He is looking for
you. Because He is not willing to give up on you. He is not willing to lose you,
because you are His child. What is amazing about God is that, I have broken a
lot of phones in my life, and I have not always been able to put them back
together, but God is always able to put back together the pieces of your life
that you feel like are no longer usable, and He knows where the wires go. He knows
how to plug things back together. He knows how to fix the seems, and He knows
how to turn the power of your life back on. The really cool thing is that,
whenever we turn away from whatever it is that might be destroying our lives, is
that God—not only can He put us back together and make us whole in Him—but He
can also use us to accomplish His purpose for our lives.
I am reminded of something recently that I said to God. I just remember
thinking about a mistake that I had made, and I remember thinking about all the
mistakes that I have made in my entire life, and I saw a picture of Jesus
walking up the road to be hung on a cross. I remember saying, "God. Jesus,
I am not worth that!" And He said to me, "Exactly! That is how much I love you. You were not
worth it, until I decided that you were." I believe that God is not done with you.
He is not going to give up on you. He is there, and He is waiting for you to turn to Him.