Knot If I Can Help It!

This will require a little background material for it to make sense. About seventeen or eighteen years ago, we traveled to a place called Valley of the Angels on one of my eleven July mission trips to Honduras. While there, I bought a number of small wooden crosses on strings and gave them to students at WCS when school resumed in August. This proved to be a wildly popular gift and served as a reminder of our school's fund raising efforts for Jovenes En Camino, a childrens' home being built outside the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Over the years, several of my students from Honduras, Patricia and Paola Estrada, would bring some back to me after they traveled home but the biggest blessing we received was when the young men at Mission Lazarus in Honduras, under the direction of Jarrod Brown, began making them for us at their apprentice carpentry shop in Choluteca. Since then, they have become part of the fabric of our school culture- I love seeing ex-students wear them in their picture postings on Facebook.

Several days ago, Jarrod's annual shipment of new crosses arrived in time for the distribution of the bank bottles we use to collect coins for Mission Lazarus and now, Hope For Haiti's Children, as well. On Wednesday in my sixth period Gospels class, I had several students who hadn't received a cross yet or had lost theirs. Rather than open the new packages of crosses, I decided to use up the remainder of last year's shipment but there was a problem. As time goes by each year, the cross necklaces inevitably get tangled up in knots. Bad knots. I grabbed a big handful of the necklaces but couldn't shake any free. No problem! Sarah, one of students in that section, volunteered to untangle the number needed! Since I am almost useless in the separating department, I quickly granted permission and Sarah was able to extract the needed three plus a few extras from the morass. At the end of class, I thanked her and she had a strange question:
"Coach, can I untangle some more tomorrow?"
I was incredulous. Of course! But I had to ask:
"Why would you want to?"
Sarah told me, "It's a stress reliever!"  True to her word, she spent seventh period on Thursday working on making something manageable out of a mess.
Now, it would drive me crazy spending anytime on that sort of task. But when I asked girls in my other classes, they agreed with Sarah and told me they would enjoy the job. Not the boys. One echoed my sentiments exactly:
"Why don't you just take some scissors and cut them out?"
Perfect! It would be relatively easy to re-tie the strings with no discernible damage to the final product. Just one more difference between the fairer gender and the rest of us!

We talk about honesty a lot in my classes. One note I always give is that, "The truth is simple- lying is complicated." Doing the right things means we have less messes to clean up. Hebrews 12:1 urges us to, 
"throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles.''
It's so easy to get tangled up, just like those necklaces. If only temptation wasn't so..... tempting! Untangling our sins sometimes is complicated and time consuming- Sarah has the right idea. Me, I just want to rush in and start cutting and maybe do more damage in the long run. Jesus confronted sin but He was gentle about it when the situation called for gentleness. Entanglements don't come in the one size fits all package. Like those crosses on strings, it's not always easy to see what goes where and how best to extricate the single strand from the group. It's so much easier for us if we stay out of the web of sin that entraps us. At least with the crosses, we've got Sarah. 

Applicable quote of the day:
We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time, what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally, God's light shines through the tapestry, and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence.
John Piper

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com