“There but for the grace of God go I.”

That’s the message that ricocheted through my conscience as I stared up at the revolving red and blue lights in the rearview mirror of my pickup. My heavens, the damage I could have done.

You know the story. Maybe you’ve done so yourself.

My schedule can run a tad to the hectic side most days. And I often find myself running from one appointment to the next. Too much to do in too little time, and all that. I know you feel it too.

On this particular day, I broke a cardinal rule of my own: Sitting at a stoplight, I reached for my phone to punch a button and join a meeting. There’s no good excuse, of course, but I felt that internal pressure to squeeze productivity out of every single minute of my day. … Including those minutes spent driving.

My own little inner voice for the good told me this wasn’t a good idea. But the other voice said, “Ahh, go ahead. It’s one phone call.”

By the time I looked up again, there was the squad car behind me with lights flashing. I didn’t even need to guess why.

The officer was kind, and after checking out my license and insurance, diplomatically reprimanded me for my bad decision. And rightly so. I couldn’t even dispute the consequences.

To make matters worse, I often harp on our kids about distracted driving. What a poor example I set for anyone who might have been watching.

Friends, I was lucky. No one was injured because of my lapse in judgement. And I know that the Holy Spirit was working through the officer who pulled me over. Each of us, after all, needs the larger community to keep reminding us to make good decisions. This is the importance of the one body of Christ, as the Apostle Paul so often reminds us.

“For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me.” 1 Corinthians 15:9-10

For those who need to hear it today: I was thankfully reminded by this officer that we are not the things we do, nor accomplish. We are human beings, each of us wonderfully created by the Creator. And that is enough.

Devlyn Brooks is the CEO of Churches United in Moorhead, Minn., and an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America serving Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He blogs about faith at findingfaithin.com, and can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com.