Young miss Sarah, our great-niece, has lovely hair that flows down over her shoulders. Her grandmother, my sister had a new hair brush, one of the round ones with fine teeth on it, about which she specifically told her grand daughters “do no use my hair brush.”
Of course as you can probably already guess, Sarah used her grandmother’s hair brush. How do we know? Because while we were finishing a family supper, Sarah came down from upstairs with the hairbrush terribly tangled in her lovely long hair. Not just tangled, but knotted into a large mass on the side of her head.
Being a man I guess I could not imagine how you could ever get the hairbrush out of her hair without cutting her hair. But, three of our family’s women worked on her hair for about an hour and got it out. Of course they had to get wire cutters and cut the bristles off of the brush one by one to do so.
When she saw her granddaughter’s hair; what do you think was the first thing my sister said? How about, “Didn’t I tell you not to touch my hairbrush?” Isn’t it amazing that since the creation that type of question is probably the most repeated in history? In the very beginning God asked almost the same question of his very first children. In Genesis 3:3 after Satan whispered in her ear that she could get away with disobeying, the first woman, Eve, admitted: “God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it…” But of course you know how that that went… she touched it anyway. Later God asked, “Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Her life had become a tangled mess because she didn’t obey a simple rule which was given by her father, God.
How many times are we like Sarah, or Eve? It’s a simple thing, no one will know, it will just take a minute, one puff, one joint, one drink, one word; one time in a compromising situation, and after all, no one will know… How many lives have become tangled messes because of “just one time”?
My sister’s response to her granddaughters predicament was and destroying her new hairbrush was: “Hairbrushes can be replaced, kids can’t”. The world if full of people who are suffering the consequences of “just one time”. Thankfully we have a loving God who always accepts us back when our lives become tangled messes.
My favorite verses in the Bible come from 1 John 1:7-10 that talks about our struggle in life and our far too often failures. John writes: “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Now there is a little more to getting into contact with the Blood of Christ to begin with (Romans 6), but in understanding that there is always forgiveness when we get tangled up we find hope to overcome and go on with life.
May you life be without tangles, but if it’s not, God can fix it.
