Competing in a history fair wasn’t an everyday occurrence for my homeschooled
boys, and when they were invited to participate in the Historica Fair at their
dad’s school, excitement soared. Carefully they wrote their reports, perfected
their models, painted their display boards and made up their title banners. Then
they asked me to scrutinize the report pages that they were ready to paste on
their displays. Oh dear! What I found was far from perfect! The reports were
full of misspelled words and missing capital letters. Some paragraphs were
indented while others were not, and my boys had obviously not quite mastered all
of the punctuation rules!
It was not the time to panic yet, however. In this modern computer age, all it
means to fix a mistake is that you have to go back to your original document,
make the change, and reprint it. The mistake is gone. It’s as easy as that!
Sadly, the pages of our lives can be compared to my sons’ flawed reports. We are
all born with a tendency to leave off the capital letters—look out for self
first—and by continually wronging others, we misspell thousands of words. We may
try to correct these mistakes on our own, but generally this just leaves behind
a black smudge. And sometimes, no matter how hard we try to do what is right, we
don’t have the knowledge or the power to do so!
Good news, friends! There is a master computer file of your life, and the
computer operator is none other than Jesus Christ Himself. When you give your
life to Him, He goes back to the computer, He pulls up your file, and He
corrects all of the mistakes. Then He reprints the your entire life document,
flawless, complete, ready to be posted on the display board of your life. The
Bible tells us: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as
snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” (Isa 1:18 NIV)
A clean slate! A perfect report! All because of Jesus! Why? Because He loves you
that much! Because He gave up HIS life to correct the faulted pages of YOUR
life!
Once the final touches were on the history reports, my boys busied themselves
pasting the pages to colored construction paper. Then they measured out just how
each would lie on the painted display boards and carefully glued the
construction paper to the display. Wow. Perfect! They were finished.
Proudly the boys brought their boards upstairs and propped them up on the
couches to practice their oral presentations. They guarded those now-perfect
displays carefully. Nothing could touch them! But it’s hard to keep things
perfectly clean in a home as busy as ours. The dog wouldn’t leave them alone.
When she wasn’t busy sniffing the boards with her wet nose, she was beating them
with her strong tail. And the birds. Once out of their cages, the display boards
was the first places they would fly! How they love to chew up paper, and of
course we also had to consider what comes out of the other end of them and drips
down whatever they are sitting on! We were in a constant state of panic:
“Salida!” (the dog) “Get away from there!” Or “No, Estrella!” (that’s the Sun
Conure) “Don’t chew on that board!” Or “Mom! Mom! Rocket (the cockatiel) just
pooped on my report!!!”
Sure enough, some of their precious pages were smudged. What could we do? We
couldn’t take them off to replace them, not without tearing a hole in the
display board! There was only one solution: Reprint the pages, perfect and
complete, and paste them carefully over the top of the ruined ones.
Did it work? Yes. You couldn’t even tell that there had been a problem. And then
I joined in the quest to keep the birds and the dog away from the history
projects!
Friends, sometimes, after we’ve given our heart’s to Jesus and God has corrected
the pages of our lives by making the blood-stained spots in our hearts white as
snow, sometimes we goof again! Once we give our hearts to God, we begin to abhor
sin; but those little sins sometimes keep creeping back into our lives! Our
previous pattern of lying sticks up its ugly head and before we even think
twice, a lie slips out. Or that angry temper flares up at just the wrong time.
Our clean pages are now smeared with the moisture of the dog’s nose. Our perfect
report now has a spot of bird droppings! What do we do?
Friends, what we do is we give that stained, smeared page back to Jesus. He will
simply reprint another one, one that comes from HIS perfect character, and
“paste” it onto the old one, completely covering up the smear. He will ask us to
be more careful next time, but like I did with my boys, He will lend His aid to
keep the same thing from happening again!
Made of mistake? Reach out for Jesus’ computer and paste!
Lyn Chaffart
The Illustrator: This daily newsletter is dedicated to encouraging
everyone to look towards Jesus as the source of all the solutions to our
problems. It contains a daily inspirational story, a Bible verse and encouraging
messages. HTML and plain text versions available.
The Nugget: Published three times a week, this newsletter features inspirational devotionals and mini-sermons dedicated to drawing mankind closer to each other and to Christ.