Photo by Paolo Mandica on Unsplash

Several years ago, at the Colorado Christian Writers Conference, my writer-friend, Tim Shoemaker, gave a devotional talk based on smashed tomatoes. Now, you need to understand. Tim doesn’t just speak his devotions. He demonstrates them. Dry ice and hot dogs? Toilet paper and leaf blower? Yep. So, if he’s speaking about smashed tomatoes, you can bet there will be some ripe tomatoes that meet up with a mallet of some sort.

This post is not a word for word of Tim’s devotion. It’s what I got out of it from how Tim compared our lives to smashed tomatoes. He pointed out even though God is in control and has a plan for our lives, we mess up sometimes. That’s when we might feel like a smashed tomato. Not good for a whole lot.

But even when we do mess up, God isn’t finished with us. He doesn’t throw us
away like…well…a smashed tomato.

During his devotion, Tim challenged us to think of different things we could make out of smashed tomatoes. People mentioned salsa, tomato sauce, tomato juice. I’m sure you can come up with your own list of delicious things created from a few smashed tomatoes.

In order to make each of those things, the tomatoes must be rearranged. Broken. Re-purposed. Changed. Transformed.

You getting a picture here?

Tim pointed out things such as salsa don’t come ready-made. Lots of ingredients need to be put into place before those ripe tomatoes become the salsa on our chips.

Same with our lives. In God’s hands, the smashed tomatoes of our life can become something good. Despite what it may look like or what we might believe, in God’s
loving, gracious eyes we are something beautiful.

If we let him, Jesus can take the broken pieces and rearrange them. He can
re-purpose them. If we let him, Jesus can take our mess and make something
useful out of it. If we let him, Jesus can transform us into someone he can use
to complete his work here on this earth.

Feeling like a smashed tomato? Might I make a suggestion? Hand the messy pieces over to Jesus.

Leave a comment below to share your thoughts on the subject. If you think
others would appreciate reading this, please share it through the social media
buttons.

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

You can find my May Inspire a Fire post here. Please stop by and read it.

I wish you well.

Sandy

Please enter your email address on the form located on the right sidebar to sign up to receive posts every Tuesday and Thursday. Thanks!