Are you someone who wants to do things perfectly the first time? I know I am.  From my writing, to taking care of my siblings and my new kitten Heidi May, to doing schoolwork and basic household chores, I want everything done right. No mistakes, and no second attempts. I don’t want to have to apply the “practice makes better” or “once burnt, lesson learned” quotes to my life.

But I still find that often, I fall short of my own expectations. When that happens, I’m apt to beat myself up. I’d like to blame it all on the obsessive compulsion disorder (OCD) I’ve dealt with in the past (which led to my excessive hand-washing when I was twelve/thirteen). But my mom knows my heart.

“I know you want to please God, Dad, and me,” she told me not too long ago. “But you can’t go through life stressing over everything. You need to be okay with letting some things go.”

I will mess up. I have messed up. Crossing a road prematurely and getting honked at has left its mark; now I feel uncomfortable crossing a road at all if there’s a car in sight. Question is, does God want me to live in this fear, in guilt and regret over things gone wrong and what possibly could go wrong in the future? Or does He have a different plan for me, one that might just include learning from it and moving on?

This past week, Pastor Noll preached on 2 Kings 4:38-44. The message was an excellent one and very encouraging to me, as I’d never before thought to dwell on the prophet’s son from that story. When I was initially reading the passage during the service, I couldn’t help but think, How on earth could that man have come back to camp and added gourds to the pot, when he didn’t even know what they were? I certainly would not have done that!

That, of course, was my pride talking. How many things have I done that other people would (wisely) never do, and I don’t find that out until later? Too many. And I’ll bet that when the man first brought back those gourds, his starving companions were delighted. They probably praised him while he was chopping the gourds up and adding them to the stew pot. “We’ll have a filling meal tonight!” someone might’ve exclaimed.

But things started going horribly awry almost at once. “. . . while they were eating of the stew, they cried out, ‘O man of God, there is death in the pot!’ And they could not eat it” (2 Kings 4:40, emphasis mine).

What must the man who’d brought the gourds have thought? Perhaps he, too, was feeling sick from the stew, or he was waiting to be sick. Or perhaps he was looking to pin the blame on someone else, reasoning, I just know it wasn’t my gourds. It was probably the herbs someone else put in. Or perhaps his conscience was on fire, and he wondered if his single act of foolishness would cost the lives of other humans—maybe even his own life.

Regardless, this was an experience he (along with everyone else present) would surely never forget.

I hope that after Elisha added in flour to cleanse the stew (2 Kings 4:41), he was like my mom toward the one man. Knowing the mistake hadn’t been intentional, he drew him aside and assured him things were fixed now, and he was forgiven. “Don’t stress about it. Just . . . don’t do it again.” However, the Bible doesn’t tell us what happened to the man. We don’t know if he stuck around or left. We don’t even know his name!

What we do know, and what Pastor Noll pointed out in his sermon, is that God works through situations even as dire as this, and His grace and redemption reach past our biggest failures. Paul wrote in Philippians 3:13-14, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it on my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (emphasis mine)

When Christ has saved us by the blood of His Son, He doesn’t want us to live a life of regret. “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). Continually pondering the what if and what might have been only serve to chain us down.

God uses all things. Period. He was still using that pot of stew; He didn’t have Elisha dump it out. I had an online math quiz this past weekend and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. The settings on the website weren’t functioning properly, and, growing frustrated, I just wanted to reset the whole quiz and start over. My professor insisted he could get it fixed; I didn’t believe him. But he was right, and I ended up finishing the quiz without restarting.

Likewise, God simply urged Elisha to put flour in the stew. Don’t get rid of it, just put in one more thing. And what happened? The stew was cleansed. “There was no harm in the pot” (2 Kings 4:41).

You and I, left to ourselves, are like deadly concoctions of stew. Nothing about us is good; we’re similar to the gourds that at first glance may appear perfect, when in reality we’re rotten to the core.

Yet God doesn’t throw us out. Never has, never will. Rather, He has cleansed us through Jesus’s blood, turning our lifeless, stony hearts into vessels fit for His kingdom work (2 Timothy 2:21). Because of this immense gift, He instructs us to have a godly grief that “leads to salvation without regret” (2 Corinthians 7:10).

Join me in living fully in His grace and redemption today, remembering that no, we’re not flawless, and no, we won’t always get it right, but as Paul said in Philippians 3:12: “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own.” (emphasis mine)

Image found online.