I noticed the tragedy the moment I drove into my garage. Apparently one of my bikes had been in the way of my daughter’s car.

As you can see the front tire didn’t take to meeting the car head on.

My response was not anger, I hadn’t used the bike in several years and I had to get new tubes for the tires anyhow, it was more contemplation. As I continued to ponder the situation I thought about my daughter’s perspective in trying to slide into my garage when I had stuff such as this bike on her side. I came to the conclusion that it was time to clean my garage.

Last Saturday was the day I devoted to cleaning the garage. I spent all afternoon on the garage but by the time I was done it was so clean I wanted to sleep there.

I moved the bike from my daughter’s side of the garage and put it on my side. I positioned it between two storage cabinets so that I wouldn’t be able to drive into it.

When I was done I felt so good. Then I sent a text message to my daughter about the bike, asking her if she had ran into it. She apologized. I told her it was no big deal.

I kept thinking about this though and I was pretty content with how I had handled it. I had felt like I had handled it as Christ would have wanted me to.
Instead of getting irate, I had looked at the situation from her perspective. Then I had taken the heart of a servant and removed the obstacle from her path and put it into my path. I thought this was basically what Christ had done for me on the cross. Taking the obstacle of sin and placing it on his shoulders so that my heart could be clean.

Then the most unusual thought occurred to me. Wouldn’t it have been crazy for my daughter to take the bike from my side of the garage and insist that it be on her side so that she could run into it again? Yet, how many times have I confessed the same sin to God, asked Him to cleanse my heart and then ran back and grabbed that sin again?