To Fix or ...Not...

   For many years, we had a dining room set that I loved. It was cheaply made but it looked "cute" plus it fit perfectly in the small dining room that we had and it could seat about 5 people comfortably. What more could a person want?  When my husband came to look at it, he growled something about how a person could want "real wood"
   It consisted of a wrap around bench with a brocaded seat cushion; this provided seating for two sides of the table.  On the side closest to the kitchen, we just had a backless bench with the same patterned seat cushion.  Everything matched!  But I think my husband growled something about "poorly glued pieces" and "extra holes in the wood" and maybe the phrase "must-have-been-a-floor-model"
   None of that phased me until our first dinner guest came over, sat down on the edge of the backless bench, and accidentally flipped himself onto the floor.  It was an "oh my!" moment as we rushed to help him get up, complicated by the fact that he was from another country and didn't speak English well.  How to explain in pigeon English that this was not an on purpose thing? That we didn't draw unsuspecting people into our house to watch them sit on the bench and then watch them being unceremoniously dumped onto our wood floor, like we were trying to create our own funniest home videos...
   This was a problem...  One I couldn't ignore.
   I asked Phil if he could fix it but he told me the bench didn't just have a problem:  it was structurally unsound.   It would be easier to build a new one than to fix what we had.
    Human nature is pretty much the same.  We can be covered in brocade on the outside but it doesn't take much to "tip" the balance in our lives and, as Tom Hanks said in You've Got Mail... "Hello! It's Mr. Nasty again."
     I loved worship this morning, absolutely loved it in spite of a sinus thing going on somewhere behind  my eyes.  I took some medicine when I got home and slept for about 2 hours this afternoon.  When I got up, I surmised that  someone had gone against my express wishes, although I wasn't quite sure,   and suddenly it was "Hello, Mrs. Nasty".  Just the thought of possible "insubordination" /= caused me to  quietly begin to steam on the  inside even though my" brocade cover" was in place on the outside.
     I started shelling  boiled eggs so that I could devil them - a fitting activity for me right then - but at one point, my anger just flashed through me in a way that I thought only hot flashes could do and before I knew it,   I had taken one of the eggs that I was shelling and dunked it in the trash container as hard as I could, even though there was nothing wrong with it. Never done that before... But there is always a first time, I guess!
    Someone has said that Christianity is not a do-it-yourself self-help course.  God sent His only Son to earth because we are structurally flawed, no matter how good we might  look on the outside.   Anger, self-pity, selfishness, pride, are all waiting below the surface, right along with the capacity to love, to be generous, and to be kind.  But the fact is, the nasty impulses never completely go away.  Perfectly good boiled eggs sometimes go into the trash, shoes can be gently lobbed at the closet door, tires can be kicked...
    That is why we need a Savior and that is why we need to walk closely with Him, day by day, step by step, yielding to His agenda, filled with His Spirit.
     Christ came, not to "fix us" but to make us new.
     Accepting Him as Savior is the first step on that road to "newness". Submitting to Him and walking with Him daily, or in my case today, hourly, is the next step.
     II Cor. 5:17  "Therefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things passed away, new things have come."