Tiny Brackets

  My first car was a 1985 GMC diesel suburban.  It was twenty different kinds of awesome.  It was huge, loud and could be seen or heard from a mile away.  It was somewhat less than reliable and had a tendency to leave me by the side of the road, and while I would have gladly traded it in for a little sports car (in which I probably would have killed myself by driving too fast), I knew that my parents were grateful for the fact that if I ever ran into anything short of a tank, I would be safe.

  One of the many problems with the car was that it had a bit of a rust issue.  And by that I mean that there were rather noticeable holes in the side of the car that we filled with putty and primed over.  It wasn't particularly attractive.  Then again, neither am I, so perhaps it was fitting.

  The rust was rather pervasive, and it was doing a rather thorough job on the undercarriage by the time I was 18.  Around that time I started to notice a very loud rattle whenever I drove it.  It sounded like the entire exhaust system was going to shake loose--I kept waiting for the day I would look in the rearview mirror and see the entire thing on the road behind me, the car gloriously free of that constant rattle.

  Being young, I usually turned the radio up and drove faster to drown out the rattle.  The car's A/C didn't work, so the windows were usually down, meaning that it was often loud enough for me to pretend there wasn't any rattle.  But at low speeds you couldn't escape it.

  After a long wait, I finally crawled under the car to see what was about to fall off.  Expecting to find the car perilously close to total death, I instead discovered a tiny bracket had rusted through and was just sitting on top of the exhaust pipe rather than screwed tightly to the frame.  It wasn't an important bracket, and was much smaller than the noise it produced.  With thanksgiving I removed the bracket and resumed peaceful driving.

  Sin is like that tiny bracket.  Our sins don't have to be huge to disrupt our lives.  We often think we can ignore the small sins, turning up the 'noise' in our life to drown them out.  We think we can escape their influence and focus on the good things, pretending that pesky sin isn't important enough to deal with.

  But every sin is important, even the ones we think are small.  When we slow down, we notice how disruptive they are, how corrosive they can be, how damaging they are to our spiritual health.  Each and every sin, even the smallest of sins, can take root in our hearts and grow until it is so large it forces us to deal with it.  Let's not make light of any sin.  Let's take the time to crawl into the depths of our hearts, to get into the dirty undercarriages of our lives, and remove sins.

  This often requires the help of a faithful and discerning friend, one who is capable of listening with patience and love, challenging our assumptions and pushing us to be completely honest with ourselves and with God.

  It certainly requires the strength of Christ.  We need to remember to focus on his love and his grace while we deal with our sins, lest we fall into the trap of believing that our efforts to remove our sins will earn us more love.  Jesus can't love you more than he already does--our sins distract us from that love, preventing that love from flowing through us out into the world.

  The devil has spent thousands of years teaching us how to sin and how to ignore sin.  We'll never root every sin out of our hearts, but let's make sure we are putting the effort in to try and do so.  If we fail to do so, they only grow louder and larger, festering in our wounds until they demand our attention.  May we take up the humility necessary to accept our sinfulness and let Christ's love and grace do a work in us.