Sermon Illustration

This Password Changed a Life

One morning Mauricio Estrella walked into the office, sat down at his desk, and was greeted with the message: “Your password has expired. Click ‘Change password’ to change your password.”

You know how, when you are emotionally raw, small things can be so frustrating? This, for Estrella, was one of those times. He was running late that morning, had forgotten to eat breakfast, had a meeting to attend, and then there were those nagging frustrations with his ex. Estrella had just gone through an emotionally brutal divorce that had left him in a deep depression.

At his workplace, the server is configured to ask thousands of employees around the planet to change their password every 30 days. As the empty field with the pulsating cursor awaited his input, Estrella thought to himself, “I’m gonna use a password to change my life.” His password became: “Forgive@h3r.”

Each time he came back from a break or lunch, he typed “Forgive@h3r.” For one month, the password became a mantra. And that mantra changed his life. Estrella shared: “That constant reminder that I should forgive her led me to accept the way things happened at the end of my marriage, and embrace a new way of dealing with the depression that I was drowning into.”

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