It was a beautiful silk red tie covered with black labs. I don’t usually buy neckties. I wait for someone to give them to me but this one really spoke to me. I just had to have it. Today I wore it for the second time. Today I ate a sandwich with tomatoes and mayonnaise. Today a tomato slipped out between the two pieces of bread and covered my wonderful new red tie with mayonnaise. Some days it barely pays to get up.
I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to wipe it with my napkin lest I press the mayo deeper into the fabric. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do. I took it off and took it to my wife.
Now I figure you know where I am going. Jesus is the ultimate stain remover. “Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.” It occurred to me that Satan loves to have us try to get out of trouble by ourselves. He knows we will just smear it around and make it worse. We can try our best and it isn’t good enough. We need help. Fortunately the help is there.
In one of Jack Kennedy’s more famous speeches he said, “There is no problem that man has made that man cannot fix.” While I loved the man’s rhetoric I had to disagree with him on this one. We make lots of problems we cannot fix. But Jesus is always ready and waiting and He can fix anything.
Written by Roger Bothwell on November 10, 2003
Spring of Life, 901 Signorelli Circle, St. Helena, CA 94574