I Saw It Coming

I saw it coming.As a parent I have slowly learned that only some hills are worth dying on. I am notorious for wanting to die on every hill, if you know what I mean. This time, I chose not to fight. It was a petty thing anyway… so, I relaxed and realized that my kids were past the point of requiring them to eat only in the kitchen or dining room. When we moved into our new house a year ago, I made a conscious choice to care less about the house and more about the relationships and memories that we made. If you are going to have friends over as a teen, eating downstairs goes out the window, anyway. So, food made its way to the TV room and then subtly into bedrooms. As many times as I cautioned them not to leave dirty plates or half-filled Gatorade bottles on their nightstand, I don’t think they really believed me… until Saturday.I arrived home from an errand to find Annika in a little bit of a panic. The chief culprit of upstairs messiness had been trying to study for her upcoming exams. Somewhere in the midst of reviewing, she was distracted by one tiny bug, and then another. After the third little flying critter, she decided to investigate… only to discover dozens of little fruit flies hovering around one of the upstairs trash cans. Apple cores, strawberry leaves and Gatorade bottles had attracted a small army.I headed to the store, hoping to find a bottle that was concocted to eliminate these pesky critters. Roach spray. Ant spray. Wasp spray. With no luck, I resorted to asking Siri how to get rid of fruit flies. A homemade contraption with apple cider vinegar as the lure would do it. Amazingly, the traps actually worked! Now there was just one problem… they work, but eliminating all of the flies takes time. No mist or fog would do magic in 15 minutes or 15 hours.As I thought about this extra little weekend project, I thought how it is such a picture of our own journey with sin. How many times do we just toy in an area that seems like no big deal? We hear the warnings and dismiss them because it is just the smallest of compromises. “Everyone else” probably makes the same choice and seems not to have any negative effects. Maybe we spend a little more money than we should. Perhaps it was just harmless flirting. Maybe it started as merely one compromise just to fit in. Then one day, we realize that we are not immune.Will it take a swarm of bugs or much worse before you believe that your little compromise matters? There were probably a dozen days that the trash could have been taken out and no harm would have been done. No one would have ever known. Instead, we had to quarantine the room and hope that no friends wanted to come over to hang out.Can the situation be repaired? Usually, but like the fruit flies, most of the time we can’t remove the consequence as fast as we want. We can’t buy our way out of it or spray our way out of it. Do yourself a favor… don’t wait another day. Commit to identifying and eliminating your little compromises.