God is Great while I am Grated

I grated my thumb last night.  Yes, that is correct.  I was finely grating a very hard block of Parmesan cheese with a hand grater, and I slipped and grated a good deal of skin off of my left thumb.  I then proceeded  to sin quite vocally and emphatically.  Multiple obscenities escaped my lips, rather loudly.  In fact, my three dogs took refuge in the next room under some furniture:



  Even after I confirmed that it was a survivable injury and that I would Survive the Suffering, I continued expressing myself for some time until I was able to stanch the bleeding with a Band-aid.

This carnage was certainly an unexpected shock.  I do a fair amount of cooking, and incurring small cuts and burns is nothing new.  I have never autograted before, however, and I was certainly surprised at how much it hurt.  However, it did not take long before I regretted my behavior and began the process of repentance.  One of the first things I realized was that God had allowed this to happen at an opportune time.

Although no surgeon wants injuries to occur to his hands, even minor boo-boos to our hands and fingers are more annoying to us than to others.  Each day we must scrub our hands several times with antiseptic soap and a scrubbing brush with bristles, designed to cleanse our skin of all bacteria.  An open sore or burn therefore gets punished quite a bit, and the regular abrading keeps the wound open longer than usual.  This accident occurred as I began a week off from work, so God, in His mercy, allowed this to happen during a time where the injury will be allowed to rest and heal. 

I have no excuse before the Lord for my language.  Jesus tells us in Matthew 15:11, "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man."  And from Paul, "But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth" (Colossians 3:8).  And even James weighs in on the matter: "Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing.  My brethren, these things ought not be so" (James 3:10).

Jesus was even more emphatic elsewhere in Matthew: "But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment" (12:36).  So despite the fact that foul language is part of nearly every single movie made for the last thirty years, it is not something minor to our Lord.  One day I will stand before the Lord in full awareness of each and every word that I have spoken.  Among many other reasons, it will be obvious to everyone at that time that I am only in Heaven because of Christ's work on the cross. 

God knew that I would slip with that grater.  It was an opportunity for me not to sin, and I failed.  So now I have an open sore on my thumb and a bandage to remind me for the next several days of my sin, and I expect that I may even have a very small scar from now on.  I am not claiming that had I not uttered impure speech that none of this would have happened, only that I now have a physical reminder.  And certainly all injuries and scars are not due to personal sin; I give several people scars every day in an effort to save their lives from illnesses that are not part of God's chastisement.

Finally, it also occurred to me that although I grated my thumb, the words that came forth grated on God's ears.  He was offended by my outburst.  In His dwelling place, such language is not allowed.  I will not be allowed to carry such bad behavior into Heaven with me.  There will be more unexpected hurts in my life, each an opportunity to control my tongue.  May God bless me that I may not curse.