I can't access iPhone messages?

I sent my best friend an extremely long text, probably 1.5 thousand characters (it was not something you could physically say on the phone, so don't question me or give me s**t about that) and after the message wouldn't send and my messaging is locked. If I tap the messages app on my phone it just goes to a blank white page and does nothing. I took it to Verizon and the said to restart it holding lock and home key and I did, didn't fix it. He said then to go home and sync it. I did, it fixed briefly and I tried to send a short text and it stopped working again and I updated it, didn't fix. Is there anything I can do before taking it to the apple store?

Tap your home button twice, when the icons of running apps come up, hold in on them for about a second, and the minus sign (red) should come up. Hit that on all running apps. Then hit the home button again. Try to go back into messaging then.

I really hope your text got to your friend, because that would suck so bad if you'd have to retype that!

Honestly, I think the last resort of having to restore is required. You plug your iPhone into iTunes, back it up, and then restore (it will wipe everything on your phone, photos, texts, contacts, etc), but you should save your photos to your computer, and if you have iCloud, all of your settings and contacts will be saved once you log back into iCloud on your phone!

After restoring, your message application shouldn't do that anymore, since it was technically reinstalled.

I'm not sure whether to tell you or not to put the file you backed up back onto the phone, because the backup file may be corrupt, since it will be backing up everything in the text message app. So manually saving your photos and such is up to you!