Picking up the Pieces

Have you seen what goes on in the church after the service? Or do you think that leprechauns emerge from the heating ducts and put all the books in order and the chairs straight? In fact, the hard work is done by a few volunteers - the ones who greet you at the door and who get the Junior Church to come in at the proper time. Angels maybe, but definitely human ones!

Tidying the books doesn't need to be part of their job. Each of us can put the books we have used in the right place before we leave our seat. To the right, the yellow `Songs and Hymns of Fellowship', then the blue service book, then the red hymn book, all spine upward. And on the left, the Book of Common Prayer. Anything else is untidy, wrong, a mess.

There may be people who deliberately leave a mess because they know someone else will tidy it up, but most people just don't know that there is a right way and a wrong way to leave their books. Or they just forget. The words of the confession come to mind: "through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault."

It is fairly easy for us to "think again and change our ways" in the case of the service books. And it's good to know there is someone there who will tidy up for us if we forget, and is probably happy to do so, for serving others can be a pleasure.

But there are other things we cannot clear up ourselves (and I'm not referring to filling in our tax forms or fixing the church roof, where we may or may not be able to help, depending on our own skills and talents). These are the messes and muddles of our own lives.

Unlike the case of the service books, there are no set rules. We don't need to look in the Bible to find out what is right and wrong - we know it in our hearts (Rom. 2:14-15). We may say to ourselves that life, or relationships, or circumstances are far more complicated than the order of books in the back of chairs. But often there we are deluding ourselves, and there is a right way that we are not prepared to take.

Sin is addictive. The New Testament describes it in terms of slavery - and it hard for us to fully grasp how slaves lived in those days: happy but not free, and what redemption from slavery meant. Today, perhaps addiction is a more familiar analogy. Others can see the mess, the addict often cannot - or doesn't want to.

For the fact is that we cannot tidy up our own lives. We need to hand over the work to someone else. Someone who will tidy up after us and let us start again.

God is there picking up the pieces even when we don't realize it. Like the father of the Prodigal Son, God is ready to start again - to tidy things up. For the next time. And again, and again.