When Your Life Is Shattered To Dust

My will or thy will?

That is the question you must address every morning you wake up. And it’s easy to answer this question when life seems to be going perfectly well. When all the pieces are falling into place.

But how do you respond when the pieces of your life are shattered and reduced to dust?

In this 3-minute clip, Lysa TerKeurst shares the wonderful hope that “dust is the very ingredient that God loves to use. Dust is a great sign that new is just on the horizon.”

Whether your life seems shattered or perfectly in place, watch the video below and be encouraged to choose “thy will” today.

Prefer to read rather than watch? Here’s the transcript to Lysa’s talk:

You see, it's one thing if your life gets broken, and you look around and there's broken pieces ... Because you can pick the pieces back up and you can glue them back together, right? And then we Christians love to just slap a little saying on it, like "God will shine through your cracked places." And it's just like, that feels really good to say unless you're the one being cracked wide open.

But what do you do when your life has been shattered, not just in broken pieces, but you look around and you see nothing but dust? You can't glue dust back together. But here's the hope: Dust is the very ingredient that God loves to use. God took dust and he breathed into it in the story in Genesis, and from that dust he formed man. Jesus spit on the ground and mixed his spit with some dust, and then picked it up and rubbed it on the blind man's eyes, and the blind man could then see again.

Dust, when mixed with water ... Dust, when mixed with God's living water, it can form clay. And that clay ... God calls himself the potter, and from that clay, God the potter, the great potter, he can make anything from it. You see, dust is a great sign that new is just on the horizon.

And that's how Jesus, I believe, is able to utter the next nine earth-shaking, hell-shattering, demon-quaking words: "Yet not my will but yours be done." God, you know things that my flesh right now cannot possibly even know, and on the other side of this dust, there will be a resurrection that I cannot see, but I will stand on the reality that my God and his will is the best.

And don't we all have to kind of come to that kind of precipice? That kind of crucible where we have to step inside the difficult situations that we all face? And we have to declare at some moment my will or thy will? And that's really the ultimate decision we must make. Not just one time in our salvation decision, but every single dadgum day. When we are laying our head on our desk and we're feeling utterly defeated as leaders, and when we write a book that then we have to preach a message and it feels painful every time we do it, but we can stand there and we can say, "God, you, in the midst of all of this imperfection, you are the author and perfecter of my faith."