We had what ended up being a comical discussion at dinner last night. One of my daughters and her family are living with us while waiting for their new home to be built. We have Bethany, Scott, 9-year-old Malachi and 3-year-old Micah with us now. They have been here for a little over three weeks, and we are all adjusting. All in all, things are going very well.

Malachi is finishing the school year at a new school. When his mom enrolled him, she put some money into their account to pay for his lunches for the rest of the year. Malachi told us that when he tried to get “snacks” at lunch today they told him he couldn’t do it. We asked him what he meant, and he said, “You know, like chips and gummies. On Wednesdays and Fridays we can get ice cream!” It didn’t take long to discover that every day he was getting “snacks” in addition to his lunch. He never had to give any money, so he didn’t understand it was costing his parents, being charged to their account. He didn’t see anything wrong with picking “snacks” that were not included with the lunch, because he didn’t know the cost associated with those items. He was confused why they wouldn’t let him have “snacks” today, but we realized it was because he had exhausted all the funds his mom had deposited into their account. The more we discovered what he had been doing, the more we were laughing. Mom and Dad had not explained that he was only to get the regular lunch, so they were not overly upset with him. It was definitely a “teachable moment” for their family, and things will be done differently from now on.

After dinner, I was thinking about how nice it is to not have to pay for our mistakes. Even though we all have an abundance of them, some of which we have done blissfully unaware that we were doing anything wrong, and others that we knew were wrong, we have someone who paid the price for them all.

2 Corinthians 5:17–21 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

 

Thank God He gives us the righteousness Jesus earned and put our sins of Christ. All our mistakes were charged to His account, so we can be assured of forgiveness and life eternal. And we get to share that message with others who have mistakes that need to be covered, too.