Early in my law enforcement career, we investigated cases without much of the technology available today. There was no internet, no computers, no cell phones, no digital cameras, and no digitized jail records. To create a simple photo lineup, I went to the Jail and thumbed through dozens of inmate transcripts until I found five photos similar to my suspect.

Information was shared between police agencies primarily by fax. We test-fired handguns into a stack of old phone books behind the Homicide office. We hand-wrote our case reports, and the secretary typed them on a typewriter. Things were different, but we still managed to solve cases.

The greatest technological miracle for us, however, was the computer. Even that took some time to learn. Early on, I saw someone copying text from a digital document on the internet. She tried to transfer the text to her document, so she switched between screens. She memorized a sentence from the internet text, changed the screen, and typed what she remembered, one sentence at a time. She copied the article word by word, unaware of a much easier way to accomplish this.

I went over to her computer, highlighted the entire text of the internet document, and clicked “copy.” Then I pasted the whole thing into her document. She stared in amazement at the miracle that had just occurred. The time that simple act saved her was incomprehensible. She tried to accomplish the near impossible by slowly typing out what she saw.

Perhaps that’s what God sees when I try to emulate the life of Christ. I want the transcript of my life to be a copy of His, but that’s not possible. He sees my feeble efforts, done in my own strength, accomplishing very little. In His patience, however, He copies the entire transcript of the Lord Himself and pastes it to mine. When you pull the transcript of my life, you will find the perfect life of Jesus pasted where my sins once were. Not due to any effort of mine, but because of His grace. That is the greatest miracle of all.

“Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord will never count against them.” (Romans 4:7,8)