the burned pan

i have been working too much at the college for the last few weeks. getting ready for load in and tech week takes all my time. daddy-o has been super wonderful by filling in with dinners and baths and bedtime stories. the other night, he made breakfast for dinner. the kids love it! pancakes, eggs, orange juice, and cereal all the good stuff. of course i was working and didn’t get even one pancake saved for me, it was a drive thru bag for me. :(

the next morning, daddy-o was at work and the kids and i were doing some chores around the house. i emptied the dishwasher and found a frying pan with a blackened pancake mark still in it. the rest of the dishes were clean so they got put away, the still dirty pan was put to soak and i went off to the college yet again… fast forward to the next day dishwasher scene repeats! gaahhh why didn’t he scrub this out? i set it to soak and then got out the scrubber. wow, the mark on the pan was super burned on, my arm got tired of scrubbing and i had to rest! finally i got out some salt and that got most of the singe marks off.

this got me to thinking; now daddy-o did not burn the pan on purpose, but sometimes we think the bad things we do aren’t on purpose either, but they are. and those sins leave ugly stains and dirty marks on our hearts. when we try to just throw them in the dishwasher of life and keep on going. the marks are still there in all their ugliness we try to work around them, but just like trying to cook in that burned pan, it makes the job more difficult. we got to take the time to get the marks cleaned off. sometimes the marks are easy to clean. most often they are cooked on and take lots of scrubbing. to get the marks off completely though, we have to get help. that help comes from the One who made us. God the Father in all His glory, sent His only Son to this sin stained earth, where He paid the price for our sins. By accepting God’s free gift, our hearts are washed clean. we then can do the work God created us to do for Him.