Met Max. He is about 6 months old and so full of energy that he is sometimes a handful. Last night after coming home from work one of the boys went out to the backyard to take the trash out. We had Max pinned out there, due to not having a fence, and Aaron came in all excited yelling to come see Max. He was literally covered from tip of his nose to his tail in grass burrs. I have grown up calling them "stickers" as did most kids I played with. It looked as if he found a patch of these stickers and rolled in them. He was covered with approximately 150-200, and it took about an hour an a half to get them out. Max was NOT a happy camper, especially as we pulled the stickers out around his head and muzzle! There was a great deal of snapping, biting, growling and general unhappiness. As we sat there untangling the stickers out of his coat, we had to pull the hairs apart to get a lot of the stickers out. A great deal of them were really embedded in the fur. He would have nothing to do with me for a couple of hours after getting all the burrs out
As we worked these stickers out it reminded me of sin and how entangle we can become in our own "sticker patches". When we choose to ignore the Holy Spirit and decide to "roll" in the sin we see as pleasure, it is actually a painful, prickly experience that embeds in our lives to cause great discomfort and pain, not to mention separation from God. Then one by one God has to "pick" these stickers (sin) out of out of our fur(our lives) which is a long and painful process. We often try to ignore God while He deals with the sin in our lives but eventually we must just sit there and let God work. We can't remove the sin in our lives, just as Max couldn't get the stickers out, but Christ can and did by paying the debt we should have paid, death. The quicker we learn to sit there and let God work on us the better off we will be.
Well, after the hour plus ordeal of pulling the stickers out and a couple of more hours of trying to ignore me, Max warmed back up and wanted to play. Hopefully when God is pulling out my stickers I will deal with it better than Max did.
