Sticky Stuff Remover

I was recently given a beautiful arrangement of silk flowers and chocolate bars displayed in a treasure chest. The chocolate was soon eaten, the flowers added to another arrangement and I wanted to repurpose the chest itself but there was a problem. The original arrangement had been fixed by five large splodges of strong adhesive. They remained, disfiguring the base once everything else had been removed, resisting my attempts to peel them off.

There's always something left behind when we want to do something new - those stubborn flaws that are hard to shift.  

That's where God's grace and the working of the Holy Spirit come in - a bit like the bottle of sticky stuff remover I used on the chest. 

 

First I sprayed some on each of the hardened splodges of glue and waited for a few minutes. I managed to scrape a little of the top layer off but the majority of the adhesive remained unaltered, rough, ugly, still stuck fast. Another squirt, another ten minutes wait, another shallow layer - each time a superficial change but nothing significant, not the result I wanted.

 

Sometimes we say we want to change but in reality we're too comfortable, too stuck in our ways or in too much of a hurry to allow the deep alterations that are necessary. Sometimes we're too afraid of what God might ask of us if we truly surrender to him so, consciously or subconsciously, we resist, thwart or ignore what needs to be done.

 

The third time I really saturated the glue splodges, then left the liquid to soak in, not for ten minutes but overnight. Some things can't be hurried.

 

Next morning I tried scraping again.

 

Each hard stiff splodge of adhesive came away cleanly and easily - its time had come. The chest was as good as new, ready for whatever I wanted to do with it.

 

Too often we want to hurry the working of God's grace within us. We might say, "I'm ready, let's go!" when there's still so much the Holy Spirit has to do, so many ugly thoughts and habits to change, things to be done in us and through us before God thinks we're ready to move to the next stage. He can see clearly. We get impatient, we don't trust God to know what he's doing and pride leads us to think we know better. 

 

We might be able to scrape away the top layer imperfectly but the majority of what needs to be changed is left stuck solid.

 

There's enough of God's grace to saturate the hardest, most sinful heart if we let him and trust him with enough time. Rushing the process, trying to force an outcome causes breakages and ends in a very shoddy result.

 

Soaking in grace and time, relying on God to know best, doing everything his way (the end never justifies the means) - that's what brings real and eventually perfect change. Anyone can be made new and ready for whatever he wants to do with, through and for us.