A while ago, my wife’s smart phone was old and outdated; it was ready for the electronics graveyard. Online sites for selling or trading it in would not give us much for it, so since it was a busy time of the year, I decided to simply wipe the data off it and throw it in the trash. (I know I should have still taken it to a place for disposing of electronic equipment, but that is a discussion we can have at another time.)

However, I was aware that unscrupulous characters out there can use recovery software to access even deleted files and bits of information that remain, even after diligent efforts to wipe the internal memory and data storage clean.  The best way to prevent any data mining off an unused device is to physically destroy the item. Not that my wife had any top secret info there, but she certainly had personal information, communications, and some financial information stored on it.

So I set out to use the quickest way I knew to ensure her data would be forever inaccessible to anyone. I would take a hammer to it. Upon arriving in my shop downstairs, I put the phone down on the workbench and then went to connect my own smart phone to the Bluetooth speaker I had set up. (Don’t get ahead of me, now.) My work projects are usually accompanied by inspiring music. But before I did that, a phone call came in for an extended conversation.

Once the call was over, I had to run an errand upstairs and then returned to the workshop and began my task. I put the phone in my hand into the large, wrought-iron bench vice I inherited from my grandfather. After clamping the jaws of this monster tool onto the phone, I began to assault the phone with mighty whacks of the hammer, and cracks and splintering began to appear. Nobody was going to get this data!

The task of breaking the phone apart was more challenging than I had thought, but it had become a fun challenge by now. So I followed with a large pair of channel-lock pliers to get a good grip on the half of the phone sticking up from the vice. I bent the phone back and forth until it finally started to break apart (that’s a testimony to how solidly and durably iPhones are made!).

Then taking the phone out of the vice, I crammed a screwdriver in and began to pry apart the smashed-up phone—the innards were fascinating, with circuit boards and thin layers that made up the screen the image formed. I found the tiny speaker and tried to find the microphone, but the plethora of minuscule stuff in there made it hard to figure out what was what. Of course, there was no hard drive to find and destroy; it had what is called a “solid-state drive.” When I found something marked SSD, I gave it special attention with my tools of destruction.

Finally, I was satisfied and tossed the entire mess into my trash can. What an amazing device that phone was—the engineering that went into it, the brilliant minds that developed such a small, finely produced device to allow us to communicate wirelessly anywhere in the world. What a marvelous machine. It turned out to be an interesting and fun experience. But the job was done; I was quite proud of my mastery over this antiquated piece of electronics.

As I exited the workshop to tell my wife the dastardly duty was done, I noticed her old phone sitting to the side on another table, untouched. What?? Then a bomb dropped as the realization flooded my brain. I had just destroyed the wrong phone! In an instant, I surveyed all the excuses I could think of to explain away what I had just done, but the reality was inescapable. I was careless and had just done something idiotic. (When I had earlier come back down from the errand I had to run, I inadvertently put my own phone into the vice, a relatively new, perfectly fine, working one).

When I went to tell my wife, she commented, “What happened? You look like you just saw a ghost.” When I told her what had happened, she thought I was joking and said, “That’s not funny.” When I finally convinced her, she began to laugh—it was either that or cry. I had done one of the dumbest things in my life; now we were minus a perfectly good smart phone and still had the old malfunctioning, outdated smart phone. Admittedly she saw the humor in it before I did since she had already gotten a new phone to replace her old one, and now I was the one without a phone!

Why do I share this self-incriminating story publicly? Well, I must admit it is funny, to my embarrassment. It happened about ten years ago, and we have recovered from the financial hit we took because of it, so I can now laugh more heartily, claiming the stupidity had to do with my younger self! But when others hear this story, it often brings a laugh and then a comment like, “That reminds me of something stupid I did also …” We have all done stupid in our lives. At times, we need to apologize (which I did to my wife, because our budget didn’t allow us to easily absorb the cost of my mistake); we may need to make things right with others who have suffered from our mistakes; and we need to learn from our errors—but there are times we need to have a good laugh at our mistakes and at ourselves.

Finally, we need to extend grace to others when we see them doing stupid things and remind ourselves, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” After all, God used a man named Peter, who stupidly denied the Lord three times, yet God still wanted Him to shepherd the people of God (John 21:15-17). He can still use you and me.