05/30/2026
The Island of Misfit Toys
When I was a kid, my favorite part of Rudolph was never the part everyone remembers. It wasn’t the shiny nose. It wasn’t the foggy Christmas Eve or the big rescue at the end.
It was the island.
That quiet, faraway place where the broken toys lived. The ones nobody wanted. A train with square wheels. A cowboy riding an ostrich. A water pistol that shot jelly instead of water. A doll who didn’t even know what was wrong with her, only that she’d been set aside. Only that no one had picked her.
They weren’t bad toys. They weren’t useless. They were just different. And different, it turned out, was enough to get them left behind.
And then Rudolph made a promise. He said he would come back for them. He said he would find them homes.
I knew that island. I lived on it when I was a kid. I think a lot of us did, and a lot of us still do. We just got better at hiding it.
Nine years ago God broke something in me.
For years I had been climbing. Chasing metrics. Counting the things I thought a pastor was supposed to count. Seats filled. Numbers up. The right speakers, the right music, the right show. I had convinced myself that bigger meant better and busier meant blessed. And one day all of that abruptly died in me. It just went dark.
I don’t know how else to describe it. The thing I had been building my whole sense of worth around simply stopped breathing. And in that silence, with nothing left to perform, I went back to the Scriptures. Not to prepare a sermon. Not to find a point. Just to look. And I watched how Jesus actually lived.
I’m nowhere close to being exactly like Jesus. Let me say that plainly. But I saw something I had missed for a long time, something that had been sitting right there on the page the whole time.
Jesus didn’t build a social club.
He didn’t protect a history or guard a tradition. He didn’t worry about who would be impressed. He went straight to the people the religious had already written off. The tax collector everyone despised. The woman everyone whispered about. The l***r no one would touch. The ones left out. The ones left behind. The misfits.
He didn’t wait for them to clean themselves up first. He didn’t make them earn a seat. He just went to them, sat with them, ate with them, loved them right where they were.
And somewhere along the way the church stopped doing that.
It got good at putting on a service and forgot how to be of service. It learned how to fill a room but forgot how to find the one person standing alone in it. It polished the stage and tuned the lights while the people who needed Jesus most stood outside on the steps, certain they would never be welcome through the door. Certain there was no room for someone like them.
That breaks my heart. Because that was never the church. That was a building. That was a show. The church was always supposed to be the island that goes looking for the toys nobody else wanted.
So when God started Wellspring, He brought all of this back to my heart. Rudolph and the island and that promise. He reminded me what I had felt as a kid, watching those toys wait for someone to come back for them. And He let me carry it into who we would become.
We’re the island of misfit toys. We know we’re not for everyone, and we have made our peace with that. We are not trying to be the biggest or the shiniest or the most impressive room in town. But we are for every single misfit who ever wondered if there was a home for them.
So let me say it to you the way I wish someone had said it to me.
If you’ve ever stood outside the door wondering if there was room. If you’ve ever felt like the toy that got passed over again and again, set back on the shelf while everyone else got chosen. If you’ve ever been certain you were too broken, too different, too far gone to ever belong anywhere.
You’re not too far gone. You never were.
There’s an island for that. There’s a home. And the One who runs it has never once left a misfit behind. He came looking for you long before you ever thought to look for Him.
We’re still in the struggle. We don’t have it all figured out, and we’re not pretending to. But I would not trade who we are for anything in this world.
The misfits have a home here.
And His name is Jesus.
-Pastor Paul
