Permanent Marker

I spent rather a while today trying to get permanent marker off a table. Ha!

But it did get me thinking. All it had taken to get those stains on the table was a minute or two of unthinking writing or drawing on the table with a permanent marker, maybe even less. All it took was to forget to put something between the paper and the table. In the short run, it's actually easier to not be careful of the marker bleeding through. How like our spiritual life! In the short run, it's so much easier to just let sin run loose in our life--we don't have to try to fight, we can just do whatever we want and not have to think about anything. But living like that lives permanent stains. Even when we are trying to be careful, all it takes is a minute, maybe less, of letting our guard slip, and suddenly we have sinned. And the stains on our soul from that are even harder to get off than the stains of permanent marker.