Little disasters
By Jessica Brodie
Have you ever been utterly exhausted and made a really stupid mistake? Yep, this happened to me last weekend.
I’d just come home from a grueling business trip where I’d worked hard, didn’t get enough sleep, and was nursing what would become yet another sinus infection. But I needed to prepare for the workweek ahead, so I threw my laundry in the washing machine—literally, just dumped the entire basket in, added soap, slammed the lid, and pressed start. A half-hour later, I went to load the clothing into the dryer and got a big surprise… my laundry was coated with tiny bits of globby white stuff. “What in the world?” I said aloud as I pulled out one article of clothing after another.
Finally I discovered the culprit: a wadded-up hunk of what had clearly been a magazine I’d accidentally dropped in my laundry basket as I was unpacking my suitcase.
I’d washed an entire thick magazine with my clothes. Yuck.
It took picking out as many globs of pulp as I could, plus maybe five or six more cycles through the washer, to get all those tiny bits mostly out. I only managed to ruin four items of what had been a huge load of laundry, so it wasn’t a total disaster. but let’s just say I’m never dumping laundry in the washer all at once anymore—and hopefully never doing laundry again while sleep-deprived.
The whole situation reminded me of what the apostle Paul was taking about in Galatians 5:9, when he pointed out how a “little yeast works through the whole batch of dough” (NIV). Paul wasn’t happy about the new believers getting so worked up over the circumcision issue, which was that while he’d taught them salvation came from faith as God’s gift, some people were believing false teachings that Christians had to endure certain rituals, including getting circumcised, to truly get salvation. He was upset that the people had been taught soundly but now were being swayed by false teachings, which were dangerous because they spread so quickly and influenced so many people.
Paul compared it to yeast in bread-making, which people of that time would have been very familiar with. When making bread, all you needed was a teeny-tiny bit of yeast and it would spread throughout the whole batch and become bread… a good thing! But in this case, a teeny-tiny bit of bad teaching was spreading throughout the entire Christian community and causing a stir.
Let’s have none of that, Paul was saying.
In the case of my laundry, it was no huge catastrophe. No one died, my clothes were fine for the most part, and I learned my lesson.
But think about the potential tiny things have to wreak much havoc. A little bit of gossip can destroy a community’s mindset and set it on a negative path. A small complaint can lead us down a stairwell of ingratitude. A seemingly harmless flirtation can become an all-out affair. A tiny spark can become a forest fire.
Little things, left unchecked, can become disastrous.
Is there something small and seemingly insignificant in your life, your family, your workplace or community, that’s starting to become like that tiny bit of yeast spreading through the whole batch of dough?
I hope you’ll pray on this, and together let’s keep each other strong in the Lord. God bless you!
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