How many of you out there have a TikTok account? I fought the urge to join for a long time, thinking it was a waste of time among other issues I’d heard stirred up about it. However, I did eventually give in to the new craze and sign up for an account. Immediately, I was addicted to the short videos and scrolling, which I’m positive was capitalized upon by evil geniuses. I remember one night I looked down at my phone for a “few minutes” to scroll through the app, and when I looked up, I’d lost over three hours. I was astonished. Right then and there, I decided that my scrolling time would have to be limited and purposeful for the most part, or I would have to delete this time-suctioning addiction from my phone.
Over the course of my time on the app, the algorithm that adapts to my preferences has made my scrolling time mostly filled with religious videos, funny middle-aged moms, best-friend posts, Gen-X content, patriotic creators, and recipes. This is how I met one of my favorite content creators, Torchy Swinson. She appears to be an unassuming grandma that tells some sarcastic jokes, reminisces about her late husband and her life, and shares some life lessons she’s learned along the way. Torchy now lives in an assisted living facility where she passes some of her time posting content to TikTok.
I had assumed that her name was a nickname and wondered at times how she must have gotten it. One day a few months ago, she told the story about her name. I was so excited to hear this one! Torchy is, in fact, her given name. She told the story of her sister, who is seven years her senior, getting to name her because she was not happy about her parents bringing home a new baby. The family listened to the 1940s soap opera on the radio entitled The Guiding Light where two of the characters were twins named Stormy and Torchy. Her sister obviously chose the latter name for her new sibling, and the rest is history for the now TikTok famous, Torchy Swinson.
Another part of what I love about Torchy is that she starts all her videos with, “I was gonna tell you somethin,’” which makes her that much more endearing to me. I love her little backstory, but that’s not really what I’m here to tell you about—isn’t it just my way to tell you one thing in order to tell you another?!? So, away we go…
Torchy posted a video that I watched about a month or so ago that stood out to me. I wanted to write about it then, but I felt like I was supposed to wait for some reason. This week, I felt like it was time to talk about this great idea she shared. She told of going to visit her sister one year and took her daughters along for the trip. When they got there, they had a wonderful visit. Before that visit was over, Torchy’s sister’s granddaughter, who was about 10 years old, gave Torchy “a box about the size of an old cigar box” that had a separate lid. The girl had wrapped the box and its top, cut a slot in the top, and finished it off with a bow. She asked the girl what this was for when she discovered it was empty.
The girl told her that it was God’s Box. Torchy asked her what that meant exactly. The girl replied that whenever you have a worry or a problem that bothers you that you don’t think you can solve, you write it down and put it in God’s Box. That way, you can give it to God to take care of for you. Torchy mentioned how surprised she was that this young girl had given her such a meaningful gift. Of course, she used that box once she got home.
Torchy would put worries that just kept recurring or that she couldn’t get off her mind in that box. She told how she opened the box six or eight months later to look at the worries and struggles she had given to God. She said, “You know what? Not one of those worries ever came to be. Not one.” She was so stunned at how giving what worried her to God in that simple, physical way had allowed her to literally give them to God. It also made her realize that what consumes our minds in the moments of our daily lives are not as catastrophic as we make them out to be. She ended the video for her viewers the same way I’m ending this installment for my readers—with a suggestion that you make yourself a God’s Box and see what happens for you!
