Written for Any Part of You

For decades, geneticists dismissed roughly 98 percent of human DNA as "junk" — meaningless filler between the genes that actually mattered. It sat unnamed and unstudied, treated as leftover noise from millions of years of evolution. Then, in 2012, an international team of over 400 scientists published the results of the ENCODE project — the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements — and the scientific world was stunned. What they had been calling junk was not junk at all. Vast stretches of that supposedly useless DNA turned out to serve critical regulatory functions, acting as switches that control when and how our genes express themselves. The very thing scientists had written off was, in fact, shaping who we become.

There is a sermon in that discovery.

So many of us carry parts of our story that we have written off as junk — the failed marriage, the lost years, the weakness we cannot seem to shake, the background we wish we could rewrite. We look at those chapters and see nothing of value. But the God who knit us together in our mother's womb does not waste material. El Roi, the God Who Sees, looks at every forgotten and dismissed part of your life and says, "That is not junk. I am using that."

Your identity is not built only from your highlight reel. The Almighty is writing purpose into every part of your story — especially the parts you thought did not count.