Small Mistakes

A friend of mine recently put her own birthdate on her son’s passport application by accident. A small, understandable error in the midst of the craziness that is a sudden, stressful, quickly organized move of a family of five to another country. But it had the potential of really messing up their plans, and she was, as you might imagine, quite distraught by it.

During my daughter’s recent visit here, she had a car accident. She’s a good driver (she’s probably a better driver than I am). This was actually her first accident after nine years of driving. There were extenuating circumstances: it was pouring down rain, she was in a new car where she wasn’t yet familiar with the feel of the brakes, PLUS she was suffering a migraine. But the real kicker? We had yet to get her insurance adjusted for the new car, so the accident wasn’t covered. A brief period of our not being completely on top of things led to a misstep that has been an unfortunate pain in the butt for all of us.

Small mistakes.

That IT outage a couple weeks ago caused by CrowdStrike? It was apparently the result of a tiny fault in a routine update. But it shut down much of the world for a good amount of time. The attempted assassination of Trump? I know there are multiple conspiracy theories going around and the whole thing is still being investigated. But the reality is, that failure on the part of the Secret Service could have boiled down to one or two people making a small miscalculation or error of judgment.

Small mistakes can have big consequences.

Many people from my past (and perhaps some in my present) would nod their heads gravely at that statement . . . and then take it to a theological place. Yes, they do, sister! And even more so, small sins have big consequences. It doesn’t matter how “good” of a human being you are; one small sin is enough to send you to hell!

And . . . well . . . okay. I’m not going to argue with the accuracy of that statement. But I am going to argue with the way the truth it contains is expressed.

And the way it is expressed does matter. Because there are a whole lot of people out there who have walked away from God (or refused to seek him in the first place) because they have no interest in a deity who is so petty. “So, I looked at my neighbor’s test for an answer in 7^th grade math once – and that would be enough to send me to hell for eternity?”

I get their outrage. It’s hard in our little brains to reconcile the first idea -- that God is loving and forgiving and desperately wants good things for us -- with the second idea -- that an otherwise perfect person who makes one little mistake is now condemned in that God’s eyes.

But, again, I think the problem is in the way we’re saying it; we’re coming at that truth from the wrong angle. We are viewing it as going from the top of the heap to the bottom of the pit. That’s not accurate. The truth is, we are already in the pit. Because I’m not sure sin is really the concern here; the concern is our relationship with God.

Our sin doesn’t condemn us; it exposes us. Sin doesn’t make us worthy of separation from the Father; sin makes it clear that we are already separated from the Father. The problem isn’t our behavior. The problem is our status; our behavior is just evidence of our status. Everybody does bad things – things that hurt other people and things that dishonor God – because we are born separated from the source of all good things. Jesus didn’t die on a cross merely to address my bad behavior; he died on a cross to heal the divide between me and the Father . . . and that healing is how my bad behavior gets addressed.

And I don’t think this is just semantics, friends. I think this gets at the heart of the gospel.

Ever since my daughter’s accident, I’ve had a bit of PTSD about driving. Because yes, small mistakes can have big consequences. Her accident reminded me how one slip-up really does have the potential to change everything in my life.

But oh . . . I’m so grateful that Jesus made a way so my mistakes, big and small, don’t affect my eternity.