Have you ever felt like such a massive hypocrite you want to box your own feet in cement and throw yourself into a lake?
Yeah, me too.
Being a Christian is hard, there’s no doubt about it. Some days we have good days, where it’s like golden sunshine and rainbows blasting out of the top of your head. And other days, somehow a slimy, depressing monster of horror is slithering and creeping around your home, only to discover the monster is you. And sometimes that horrible monster will shape shift and some sunshine will shoot out of her head and she will tell someone sweetly “God is love. I will pray for you. The world is fully of sparkly happy people. Be like them,” only to turn around, full monsterness emerging from the darkness, as she screams bloody murder at your children. What a Hypocrite.
Just the other day my children and I were noticing how the crack in my windshield has gotten so big. It now spreads from one side of the windshield on the driver’s side, about halfway through to the other side.
“How in the world did that get so big?” we asked.
It started months ago. A small little chink in my windshield by some random big rig truck passing by. You know, the ones that shoot rocks out under their tires. Yeah.
My husband saw the tiny little imperfection and looked at me, “That’s right in your line of vision isn’t it? Maybe we’ll get the windshield replaced.”
I laughed, “No way, it’s so tiny, that’s not a big deal at all.” It was true. I barely noticed it.
That tiny chink grew a small one-inch crack trailing from it. Still, no biggie. Whatever. It happens.
Then one day, on a frigid morning, I put the window wipers on (with my super heavy duty antifreeze window wiper fluid that instantly melts ice – if you don’t’ have this-- you need to get it. It’s freaking awesome) and as the wipers went back and forth across the glass I actually saw the crack grow.
Wipe. Grow. AH! Wipe. Grow some more. AHHHHH!
I stopped the wipers. It was shocking how the crack grew longer before I could get the wipers turned off. It did it twice, in inch long spurts. This crack, that had been so tiny, was tiny no more. It happened so fast. So suddenly.
Sometimes that’s like our own sin. We start off with something small. Insignificant (to us, not God). Maybe it’s just a little lie, maybe just a half-truth, maybe we flirted with that guy at the gas station only to look down and notice the wedding ring on our finger, maybe it was just a catty thought toward another female. I don’t know, but we thought it was nothing. God wouldn’t notice such a small sin, would he? But after a while those ‘small’ sins aren’t so small anymore. Now they’ve morphed and grown into monster-sized sins. Soon, our own sins have cracked into a massive blockage in our vision, in our lives. We feel like we can never go back, never be the same.
BUT…
Nothing is impossible with God. No matter how BIG we’ve let our sins grow, no matter how far-reaching, how much they’ve blocked our view of the world around us, no matter how deep or how wide the sin has stretched, God can and will help you stop it, if only you ask.
This got me thinking about the neighbors and their tree of never-ending bird poo. The poor guys. There’s a dad and two sons who live there. They all have nice cars and they all take pride in their nice cars. The huge hunkering tree out front was the perfect nesting spot for hundreds of birds who liked to land there for rest. And each and every day, these guys cars were covered in bird poo.
I don’t think I’ve ever lived next to people who hand wash their cars as much as I’ve seen these guys do. They’ve only lived there for a couple years and at least FIVE times they attempted to chop down this tree. All unsuccessful, until the fifth time. They were finally able to chop all the branches off. The tree still stands, about 30 feet up, but all the branches on the top are missing.
It makes me sad they cut such a beautiful tree, but on the other hand, I understand all their frustration over the last two years. Constantly getting rid of the bird poo.
Now just humor me for a moment and think of our hearts like cars, and the poo like sin. If we let our cars get exposed to the birds, is easy to get covered in poo. If we constantly let our hearts get exposed to sin, it’s easy to see how we can get covered in it.
No matter if our windshields are cracked to pieces and our car is covered in poo, there is a Great Mechanic waiting and willing to fix all our problems. To change our windshields, to mend them and replace them with an unblemished ones, to wash clean the poo, the crud, the sin from our hearts. He loves us. We are never too filthy or broken. He wants to cleanse us and make us new.
We just need to ask.
