There are some things that you can get rid of in your life. Just never throw away a person.

Concerning all the stuff in our crowded lives, there are two extremes for handling it. At one end of the spectrum are the hoarders. Everything materially that comes into their lives they hang on to frantically (and often drown under) during their lives. On the other hand are the ‘chuckers’ who easily part with stuff. Being at the absolute opposite end, far removed from the hoarders, doesn’t make this concept flawless either.

I’m not concentrating on the hoarders. It’s easy to pick on people who save every empty food can, hang on to used aluminum foil, have old kitchen tables from the 60’s buried out of sight under decades of other ‘kept stuff.’ If Christians, they sometimes fail spiritually by not trusting the goodness of God and His promise to care for them.

On the other hand are people who part with anything that can’t be kept with little bother to them. If a shirt loses a button they ‘chuck’ in the garbage or send it to a new life in the thrift store. If the cord to the toaster shorts out, it’s gonna be ‘chucked’ as well.

Prior generations considered most ‘give-aways’ as fixable. The button would be sewn back on… the toaster fixed in the basement or garage. Their attitude? This is too valuable to get rid of.

But we throw other things away far too easily as well. We throw futures away through poor choices and missed opportunities. We throw health away when a proper diet change and exercise would have saved it. We throw away the counsel of people in our lives who love us and see potential that we don’t see.

Then there’s the woman in the Bible in Mark 5:25-29 (MSG) who  “… had suffered hemorrhaging for twelve years with a long succession of physicians who had treated her badly, taking all her money, leaving her worse off than before.”

She had been thrown away!

Fortunately she realized that if she could get to Jesus and touch his robe unnoticed, that He’d be able to fix her. And that trip to Jesus fixed what had been broken for over a decade.

Never forget, some things can be ‘chucked’ easily with no harm done. But broken people need to get to Jesus… broken family members, broken homeless people, people broken by unkept promises made to them. Feel free to turn over your old toaster to someone else, but in grace-filled love, let’s steer broken people to Jesus. There are too many ‘throw-away’ people in our world.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted;

he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”

Psalm 34:18 NLT