Pastor Kevin

Toxic Mess

Last Sunday evening my wife gave me dad duty. She helps lead a small group of teenage girls at our church, and they were having a birthday party of sorts, so she was gone for several hours and left me in charge of our six month old daughter. It's not that this was the first time that I'd ever had dad duty; it's just that normally my times in charge are brief and have major overlap with her nap times. This time I was completely in charge for a period of several hours, and most of that time my beautiful daughter Elizabeth was awake. So the odds were against me that my dad duty would turn to diaper duty. Sure enough, it did, and it was not the diaper duty of the "wet only" variety. This one was serious and should have involved a Hazmat team. I did not want to back down from my dad duty, though, so I attached my gas mask and decided to take care of business.

Everything was going just fine up until the point that I detached the diaper. Somehow my precious little girl managed to get her hand into the diaper area. I quickly reached for the baby wipes, grabbing 20-30 to quickly wipe away any, ummm, stuff, before it spread. My mission failed. I would wipe, and then somehow her hand would manage to get back into the diaper and continue to spread the "issue." The more I tried to clean up the situation, the more it spread. Suddenly the “issue” was on me, on her, and on the changing pad. I quickly realized that I was fighting a losing battle, and so I scooped up the little pooper and ran for the bathtub. Evidently, I didn’t do the whole bath thing like mommy does it, because she screamed bloody murder at me the entire time. Finally, once the evidence was off me and her, I wrapped her in her towel and held her close to me. She was nice and clean and sweet and I’d finally managed to abate the screaming and shut off the flow of tears. It was such a tender moment, holding my wonderful little girl close to me and telling her everything was going to be okay. That was, until, I felt this warm substance running down my arm. She’d decided to throw up all over me and her pretty pink bath towel. Back to the bath tub...

Later that evening (once I’d put the sweet little emitter of harmful toxins to bed), I started thinking, “None of this would have happened if she would have let me change her without fighting me the whole time. She would have been clean, she would not have gone through the whole bath fiasco, and probably would not have thrown up from the experience if she’d just let me handle the situation.”

So many times our relationship with God is the same way. He is perfectly capable of handling our situation, but we try to help God and make an absolute mess. In my sermon this past Sunday I used the story of Abraham and Sarah. God made a promise to them that they would have children. They doubted his promise and decided that they needed to help Him out. So they enlisted Hagar, their younger Egyptian servant, to be the second wife of Abraham and to give him children. They succeeded in their mission, but Hagar’s son, Ishmael, became the father of the Arab people, and they have been fighting with the Jewish people to this day. To put it in brief, Abraham and Sarah decided to handle the situation themselves and made quite a mess.

What are you trying to take back from God today? What are you trying to handle, or rush along, or manipulate because God isn’t working the way you want Him to work? Are you trying to “help” God in an area of your life that He has completely under control? Be careful...you may end up with a toxic mess on your hands!