Huh?

Things that happen

Have you ever wondered how it is possible that a person does the very thing they are trying not to do. A recent example of this tendency visited me a couple days ago while working. I've taken on a project to build a fence for a friends mother and while I was marking the border of the job with strings and stakes it happened. I was hammering a stake into the ground and instead of hitting the stake, I smashed my thumb. Now the only real definable thought I had while hammering the stake was that I really didn't want to hit my thumb. Yet there it is, I hit my thumb. Now I don't think that this is Romans 7 worhty of comparison stuff, but it got me thinking.

When I was younger, I used to climb into the back of pickups for transport. While climbing into the back of a pickup, my one constant thought is that I would really not like to have my foot slip and cause my shin to rake the tailgate of the pickup. Raking my shin on a pickup tailgate is a feature of my childhood. I can't really even count how many times it happened. So why is it that I can't seem to keep from inflicting bodily harm on myself? I wish I knew.

But just the other day, I was picking up a large rock, and when I set it down, I forgot to move the hand that was under it. The result, I bruised my hand.

The main thought that I get from all this is that I really don't need enemies, I seem to do the job of antagonizing myself just fine. I wonder if I'm alone in this?

In a very shallow way this does parallel the Christian walk. A grander job is being done, like the fence, but in a small instance there was a period of great pain (hammer/thumb.) It does parallel life in that very often we do the very things we were setting out not to do. This is a source of no small amount of shame and remorse for me.