Cleaning Up After Us

We've all seen the pictures, haven't we?

The aftermath of a hurricane, or a flood, or a tornado that rips through a town.

Where everything is destroyed, covered in gooey muck, washed away.

We see that and imagine, "What if that were my home, my town, my mess? Where would I even begin? It's too massive to even come up with a game plan for cleaning this up."

Truth is, you'd begin just like those people. One board at a time, one branch at a time, one step at a time. Messes this big don't get cleaned up in a day or a week.

But then we go back some time later and are amazed to find that things are restored, homes rebuilt, the piles of debris are gone. Life has returned to some semblance of normalcy.

We've talked last week about why the world is in such a mess. And we found that it's not God's fault. It's ours. So, when God looks down and sees this world we totally messed up, it might have looked impossible, might have looked hopeless, might have looked unredeemable. He could have just built a big wall around this world and started up something new on some other planet.

But that's what separates God from the rest of us. The mess we couldn't fix, He did. Want to know about his strategy? Amazingly, He started just like we do in cleaning up after a tornado--with one branch, one board. . .or, in this case, one man.

Genesis 11-15 might be some interesting reading in preparation.

Dwaine Darrah, McLean Campus Pastor