Recently, I participated in a three-day Pecan Festival annual event over near Richton.

Located on the Fulmer Farm, this family-friendly, Christian affair was celebrating its 29th year, and I had a booth.

On the preceding evening, I had driven over to get set up and ready for the opening day.

As daylight was fading and having set all my woodcraft ware in place, I was hurrying to lower the 10-foot-by-10-foot tent to keep the moisture from getting to my craft when one of the legs bent and was about to break in two.

I had hung a lot of the heavy items from the railing as it helps to display the many various cypress and cedar plaques I was offering and the added weight was just too much for the flimsy, thin metal leg to support.

With the kind gentleman next to me helping to hold the bent leg in place and keeping the whole thing from collapsing, I went into a brief panic mode as all my efforts to keep my display out of the weather was fading with the daylight.

In and among my wares I had made a road side marker cross of cypress wood on a long treated post to give to someone who needed it for a loved one who had perished on a road somewhere.

I had made one for a young lady some time ago whose boyfriend had died in a crash last year, and I was going to offer this one for whoever God sent to my booth.

I usually wind up giving much of it away as it is a wonderful way to minister to hurting mankind and witness to dying souls everywhere.

I asked God for help like Peter when he was drowning after briefly walking on the water in the Bible.

As he began to sink in the dark cried out, “Lord save me….”

I call it the “911 call” of the scripture because the well-meaning disciple was in a bind.

Old Bro. Mike cried to God in the dark and in a bind as well.

The same hand reached out to me in a blink of an eye as it did that night on a stormy sea and God spoke to my heart to grab the wooden cross marker and drive it into the ground beside the bent metal leg.

I then zip tied the cross to the leg, and it was secured for the three-day event in its entirety.

Saved by the cross!

Had I not meant well in making and bringing this beautiful artifact to give to some hurting soul, I would have been displaced but God used my good intentions to save me.

How many times has the cross saved some struggling soul like you and me?

I listened to an interview last week with Dr. Dobson’s Focus On the Family broadcast and a lady who had recovered from a defiant lifestyle named Rose Littlefield.

She is an accomplished author and writer and now a motivational speaker nationwide.

She told how after many years of traditional marriage with her husband she gravitated to a defiant  lifestyle, embraced it and loved it.

She loved it so much she wanted to dissect and destroy the Biblical principle of a traditional lifestyle in a book she was writing and to do so she would have to study the Bible.

She enlisted a sympathetic pastor who helped her research the scriptural basis for mankind not to embrace it but at the same time not denounce or rebuke her.

She said the pastor in their research never one time condemned her or tried to make her feel like she was a misfit of the human race.

But, in the weeks of reading and meditating on the powerful Word of God, her heart was touched so much she humbled herself in an altar of repentance and reversed her way of doing.

Saved by the cross!

She was asked by Dr. Dobson what was the clincher to her turn around?

Rose said it was the kind and loving pastor who let the word of God like salt do its work and not drive her away.

Wow!

How many times have we the church community been guilty of doing the wrong thing in our approach to any and all unscriptural and nontraditional lifestyles?

Honey attracts more flies than vinegar but sadly we keep putting out a good dose of vinegar instead of the honey of the love of Christ.

The cross will save anybody from anything, be it a sagging vendor tent or a sagging moral life.

We of the church crowd must let that old instrument of grace work minus our two bits worth of condemnation.

God is the judge, not any of us.

So, what is your interesting story of being saved by the cross?

We all have one.

Mike Dykes is a pastor and story teller. He can be reached at angelsmannow@yahoo.com.