I See YOU!

I know you. No, we may have never met, but I know you. Right now you're sitting at your computer with nobody else around. You know the soft glow of your monitor as well as you know the back of your hand. Your pulse races as you move the mouse to kill your screensaver. Your heart skips a beat, almost matching the double click of the mouse as if it understands the endorphine rush that will soon follow. The images jump off the screen at you and all of a sudden you're in your very own fantasy land.
I know you because I am you. I may not look at pornography anymore, but I am still you, just a few years down the road. I see in you something that you cannot see in yourself...yet. I see in you what God sees. All you can see right now is your "dirty, little secret." God sees so much more. He sees beyond the fetor of our polluted minds and sees us for what we are, His children.
On July 2, 1997, I took 30 sleeping pills chased by half a bottle of nighttime medicine and a can of cream soda. Through a series of "coincidences" that would take too long to explain right now, I was found and rushed to the hospital. I laid in a coma for several hours until the poison finally left my system. When I awoke, I had charcoal all over the front of me where I kept puking it up every time they would pump it into my stomach. The mess on the outside seemed to be mirroring how I felt on the inside. Sitting there in that hospital, God spoke to me Jeremiah 29:11, "I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord. "Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future." I realized that God had so much more in mind for me than I had been experiencing.
In Acts 16 we find Paul's first encounter with Timothy. We don't find out a whole lot of information about this first encounter from these few verses, but what we do learn is that Paul saw potential in Timothy that even Timothy himself didn't see at times.
By the way, something I neglected to mention about when I was in a coma. I was visited by my Paul. Her name was Suzie Eller. Lying there in that hospital bed, able to hear everyone and everything around me but unable to respond, my Paul came into my room, placed my head on her shoulder and began to weep and pray for me. Why? I didn't get it. I was filthy. I was a pervert. I was a failure, even when it came to ending my life, but she saw beyond all that. She could see ten years down the road when I would be tapping out words of warning on my little ACER laptop, telling you the same thing she was trying to tell me...I SEE YOU!