God Gave Marital Headship to Men
How a Neglected Driveway Reminds Me I Need Jesus: Sin Grows
Photo by Wisely Woven on Unsplash
Ugly driveway
I was at somebody’s house recently.
He has a magnolia tree in his front yard. The root of the magnolia tree is pushing up under part of his driveway.
The driveway is pushed up so significantly that he has a stick of lumber laid down so that when he rolls over the pushed-up part of his driveway, his car does not drop down so much.
The eyesore needs to be fixed—the lumber is a bandaid.
It’s so unkempt that just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. It reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.
The proliferation of sin
The root of the tree needs to be unearthed and destroyed.
This is the feralness of sin. Upheaval. Disarray. Nastiness.
I can’t see the actual underground root of the magnolia tree, but I can see its effects—it's disturbing everything around it!
When sin gets out of control, it creates more problems that need more fixing. Even if we can’t see exactly how the messiness started.
Like King David’s sins spiraling out of control…Staying home while his troops were on the warfront…led to seeing Bathsheba…which led to lust…which led to adultery…and so on (2 Samuel 11). One sin leads to more sins.
And the worse it gets, the harder it can be to address things. The concrete driveway will have to be broken in order to address the unruly tree root.
The goodness of God
When we think of the goodness of God, we may often think of things that are pleasant for the senses, e.g. water, flowers, sunshine.
It may be wise to associate sin with what is unpleasant to the senses. How many mystics have made reference of the odors and ugliness of Hell?
"...hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched." (Mark 9:47-48 NRSVCE)
Thankfully our Lord, the master gardener, arborist, horticulturalist, viticulturist…whatever we need Him to be, is always ready to tend us in His image!
More reflections on sin and nature:
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