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Key Bible Verse: Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God (Psalm 42:5).
Bonus Reading: Psalm 23

Tom Cook was riding his bicycle to college one day when a car ran a stop sign and struck him. After three months in the hospital, the doctors' verdict: "You'll never walk again."

Confined to a wheelchair and paralyzed from the waist down, Tom says "I was angry at God. I felt He'd abandoned me." Then he met quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada. She helped Tom see how a merciful God uses brokenness to bring even greater glory and good. After five years of rage, Tom recommitted his life to the Lord.

About then, a friend let Tom drive his race car around a parking lot. "I didn't tell him I could barely move my toes," Tom grins. After one halting lap, Tom was hooked. While learning to walk again with the aid of a radical new steel-and-plastic leg brace, he went to performance driving school.

Today Tom's an associate pastor who also races a sleek red formula "Solo Vee" car. He found it languishing in a friend's backyard. Tom spent two years rebuilding it from the ground up. "That little race car and I had a lot in common—we were both rusted and busted—and just needed a little encouragement."

—Mark Byers in The Standard

Give your brokenness and pain to God for his healing.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

—Eugene O'Neill (dramatist, 20th century)

Adapted from: The Standard (4/99).

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Prayer for the Week

Thank you, Jesus, for being there when I fall.

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