Posts Tagged: bleach

“LITTLE STUPIDITIES AND GOD’S WELCOMING GRACE”

On November 21, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

Have you ever made a stupid mistake (are there smart mistakes?) that was small and insignificant, and yet that mistake made you wonder about yourself?  A stupid, small, insignificant mistake that made you wonder if you were stupid and small and insignificant?

Welcome to my world.

We were having some plumbing work done in our utility room, so I decided to clean the utility room up, so that the plumbers would have room to work.  That was a good decision.

I picked up a bottle of bleach from the floor, and placed it on the shelf above the dryer.  That was not such a good decision.

I felt a little check in my mind when I placed the bleach on this already over-crowded shelf.  As I generally do with these little warnings, I ignored it.  And, as it generally works out, I ended up regretting ignoring that little warning.

Isn’t it interesting that the word “ignorance” is related to the verb form “to ignore?  Perhaps ignorance is more a matter of refusing to know, rather than simply not knowing.  Hummmm.

A few hours after the plumbing work was finished, I heard a loud thump, and went downstairs to check it out.  Yes, my wife had heard it too.  We didn’t find out the source of the thump until I went into the utility room later that evening.  (You already know where this is going, don’t you?)

The bottle of bleach was lying on its side on the dryer with the lid off.  A large quantity of the bleach had spilled on the top of the dryer and on the floor.  Some of the bleach had splashed onto some of the clothes in the clothes basket.  Two of my shirts were ruined.

I spent some time cleaning up the mess as best I could.  I decided to multitask and also have a talk with myself while I was cleaning things up.  I will not tell you some of the things I called myself.  I think I’ve come up with some new phrases for various levels of incompetency.

I spent hours the next day cleaning the utility room up more thoroughly.  Of course, the smell of bleach lingers for a long time.

But no amount of castigating myself would get the bleach back into the bottle.  No amount of name-calling could atone for ignoring that oh-so-little mental reservation when I put the bleach on the shelf in the first place.

I would like to tell you that this is the most serious instance of me ignoring a small reservation about a decision I was about to make.  It most certainly isn’t the worst one.  It isn’t even close to the worst one.  It is just one of the most recent ones.

But there is still grace for willfully ignorant people like me—grace for the big stupidities and for the little ones.  There is grace for the mistakes that are obvious to everyone, as well as for those that are known only to us.  There is grace enough to welcome us all.  God is indeed that sort of God.

However, I’m not putting the bleach back on the shelf any more.  Perhaps these little checks in my mind are also God’s welcoming grace.

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