Oops! It was an accident!

Brokenness is the natural state of the world. It takes specific, intentional focus to fix things.

Turn away from evil and do good. Search for peace, and work to maintain it. (Psalm 34:14)

Have you ever broken something accidentally? Oh boy, I have. It’s awful. You feel so much guilt about it. Maybe you dropped your phone. Maybe you backed into a lightpole in a parking lot. Maybe you washed your whites with your reds, and now all your underwear is pink.

It’s easy to have accidents. It’s easy to break stuff, even when you aren’t intending to break stuff. And when it happens, what do you do? I hope you apologize. Even then, we always usually say the same thing: “I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

Because it’s the truth. Nobody intentionally turns all their underwear pink (you oddballs who do, don’t @ me). I truly believe that most of the time we want to help each other, not make life harder.

So what happens when you walk into a situation and fix it? What happens when you make a situation better? Do you say, “Oops, it was an accident”?

Of course not. The difference is that you don’t have to try to break stuff. We break stuff without meaning to. It isn’t always malicious. It’s just careless. It’s accidental. You don’t have to think about it.

But fixing things is different. Repairing broken things takes effort and time and intentionality. You have to make time to do it. You have to invest your skills and your heart and your focus to accomplish it.

Brokenness is the natural state of the world. It takes specific, intentional focus to fix things.

Fixing something is never an accident. And that’s what this verse is about. Our default is chaos and disorder. It’s God’s power in us that gives us the strength to bring peace into the world. It doesn’t happen on its own.

Wherever you find peace in the world, you will find someone who made it happen (and who are sacrificing to keep it in place). So if you want peace in your life, you have to be intentional about it. You have to make it, because it won’t happen by accident.

Question for Reflection

• Why is it that peace can never be accidental?

• Why is destruction so much easier to construction (or building something)?

• How are some ways you can bring order into the disorder around you today?

Weekly Memory Verse