Broken Eggs--When Your Mistakes Are Messy

The other day someone [we shall not say who] accidentally spilled a dozen or so eggs on the living   room floor. These eggs were supposed to go to a customer. Instead, they ended up on the floor!

 

Crystal and Rose industriously set about cleaning up the mess. 

And it was a mess.  

Some of those eggs simply could not be sold now. Others that had ended up on the floor had to be thrown to the dogs.

 I got the worst broken eggs into a bowl. And Crystal and Rose cleaned up the slimy egg innards off the rug, which doesn't look any worse for the wear, since many other accidents have already happened on this same 20-year-old carpet.

(We are, by the way, hoping to replace the carpet before too long with a couple pieces that a carpet supplier said he could let Jonathan have for a fraction the usual cost.)

But no matter how hard we would try, we could never have those eggs all perfect and in one piece again, not even if we were masters at putting Humpty Dumpty together again!

 I was reading the beautiful one-chapter book of Philemon today. 

This little book contains not only the affectionate love of a spiritual father named Paul the Apostle, 

but it also hints strongly at the very real and obvious mess-ups of a runaway slave named Onesimus.  

Onesimus had run away. Maybe he had been a good slave before he ran away, or maybe he had kept doing a poor job and been punished and decided to run away, or perhaps he had been a bad slave to a kind master and then run away on top of his other bad behavior. Either way, he had been, according to Paul, an unprofitable person.

But now, converted under Paul's ministry, Onesimus had become profitable not only to Paul, but to Philemon, if Philemon wished to have him back. 

Either way, Paul exhorted Philimon to no longer treat Onesimus as merely a slave but as a brother in Christ. 

Onesiumus could not fix his past. He could not change that he had been once unprofitable, or that he had once run away, or that he had done any number of wrong things.

But now he was a new person, and Paul wrote to Onesiumus about the mercy of second chances as well as the goodness and rightness of accepting a contrite slave as a brother in Christ

on equal footing.

Sometimes a mess-up can be repaired, like this vehicle that had been in a fender bender. I saw this at the ladies retreat a couple weeks ago. The girl who owned the car simply painted a scene from Lord of the Rings and another scene from C.S. Lewis, I believe it was, after the wreck and after a new used bumper had been installed. She couldn't afford yet to have a professional repair job done. So she painted her own scene over the dents.

 Brilliant! She gets raves over it.  

But not every wreck and mistake can be fixed to where it get raves.

Sometimes the wreck and mistake and mess-up just can never be done over or fixed or painted over. 

But whatever it is, God loves to turn it all around for good,

even if the mess-up is a sin as bad as the murderous acts of Joseph's brothers who threw him in a pit to die and then sold him as a slave to the traders on their way to Egypt. 

I can hardly imagine a more terrible and purposeful sin.

Yet God cleaned up the mess and turned it around for a beautiful good.

Joseph tested his brothers and then forgave them and welcomed them back into relationship. 

Paul urged Philemon to forgive and to take his slave back into relationship--without charging him for the mess-up!

This is the heart of God.