Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Rivers, By Joel Kibble "Let Me Fix It"


Let Me Fix It
My daughter loves to do crafts.  There seem to be few joys that are more inviting than grabbing some craft paper, glue, tape and sparkles and going to town on a new creation.  I will often find projects that she’s been working on and I’m amazed that she could come up with such ideas.  Well, the other day I found something that my daughter had left in the study that made me think.  While she was at her mother’s house, I came into the study and found the turquoise blue toothbrush holder that should have been in the bathroom sitting on her worktable.  She apparently had dropped and broken the top that holds the toothbrushes, as it was separated from the shaft that held it.  She had applied scotch tape to reconnect the top to the shaft, but the tape had failed to hold the large piece in place and there it was, partially hanging to the side in an awkward fashion.
At first I thought to reprimand her for not telling me about the broken toothbrush holder, reasoning that she had attempted to keep this a secret from me.  We’ve had a few conversations in the past about keeping secrets to hide mistakes.  In fact, I did recall hearing an object strike the floor the day before, but I was preoccupied with something else and didn’t follow up on the noise.  Her ensuing silence should have been an indicator that something was up, and this was it!  But then I thought about what she might have been feeling that caused her to decide to try to fix it herself.  
I reflected on my childhood.  How many times had I broken my father’s objects and tried to hide them, only to be found out and reprimanded hours, or even days later?  How many times had I been suddenly called in from playing with my friends to answer for some mistake I had hoped would never resurface again? A broken trophy? A scratched record?  A chewed up cassette still tangled in the tape recorder?  (Um, Am I dating myself?)  The lumpy throw rug in the living room of my father’s house would betray the many lists of items I’ve broken and brushed up under that rug, hoping never to be found.  So I could easily imagine what she might have been feeling in her effort to conceal her mistakes.    
As I stood in the door contemplating, I also thought that this might have been the reason why I’ve had such low tolerance for her decision to hide things from me. I see it in her because I see it in myself.  My desire to hide my brokenness causes me to learn to lie and to place the blame on other people.  It’s all too familiar to me and it comes from my desire to hide what’s broken in my life.  
My heart went out to my daughter when I thought about the little bit of stress she might have been going through that caused her to try to fix it herself.  But I didn’t need her to fix it.  I would happily have done it for her.  As I super glued the two pieces together, I longed to tell Karly that I found her mistake and that she didn’t need to hide it from me.  Things break.  We all make mistakes, but I wanted her to come to me about it instead of trying to conceal it and fix it herself.  Her desire came from an honest place, but I longed to give her the possible peace of mind that I didn’t hold her foible against her.  
So maybe this is how God thinks about us.  He knows we make mistakes and He sees how we’ve screwed up.  He knows we can’t fix what’s really wrong in our lives, and never expected us to do so by ourselves.  So maybe He looks at our pitiful patchwork and has the same tender regard for us.  He longs to relieve our stress and release us from the guilt we’ve been carrying.  Let Him have it.  Let Him fix it.


Joel Kibble is a world renowned dynamic motivational speaker, singer, songwriter, 
producer and member of the ten time Grammy Award winning group Take 6.



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