What to Do When Problems Keep Coming Back
If your family is anything like ours, a bug inside the house is basically the call for an all-out assault on the insect world. If the bug happens to be something dangerous (wasp, bee, etc.), things get really interesting. But, usually, it is just one or two bugs, and we can take care of them.
Can you imagine what it would be like for your house to be infested with bees? A woman in Houston, Texas recently had to have professionals remove an estimated 70,000-80,000 bees from her house! Even more amazing, the bees have been a recurring problem for the nearly 40 years she has lived in that house. Further, there were so many bees that the man who took care of the woman’s landscaping starting refusing service. (source)
When I first came across this news item, I had a lot of questions, not the least of which was, “Just how immune is this woman to bee stings?”
But as I thought about it more, I could not help but think about an application for our lives and our families. This woman has had an ongoing, recurring issue with these bees for four decades. I think most of us would have called in as many experts as possible many years ago, or we would have just moved. (To be fair, she has called in bug experts before, but it seems, this time, she went to some “at the top of their field” people.)
I just wonder how much that resembles the way we often try to deal with problems–even sinful problems–in our lives and families. How often do we just start getting used to it, though it just comes back over and over again? We may be irritated a little, or it may cause us discomfort for awhile, but we do not take drastic measures to truly fix the problem.
Jesus wanted us to take care of sin in our lives and root it out by any means necessary. He stated, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). He would make a similar statement in the next verse about our hand.
Our Lord was not saying to literally punch out our eye or cut off our hand. Instead, using hyperbole, He was teaching us to rid ourselves of sin by any means necessary. Yes, how often do we let a problem linger until we either just get comfortable with it, or it completely overwhelms us?
If your house was filled with bees once, you would call in experts. If it happened a second time, you would do anything you could to take care of that problem, from spending money for better experts to even selling the house and moving. Wouldn’t you?
How much more, then, should we be concerned with problems that plague our soul and our relationships with others? What steps will we take to make sure those issues do not come back again?
To Receive Every Article from A Legacy of Faith through Email for Free, Click Here
AUTHOR: Adam Faughn
