Bracket Buster

Last week the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament started. The tournament usually lives up to its nickname of "March Madness." The teams you thought would be a guarantee to go deep in the tournament may make an early exit. Other teams, like Cinderella teams, will go further than anyone ever expected. This is what is so maddening about the tournament and the brackets people fill out. The chances of picking all the correct wins in the tournament has been estimated to be 1 in 2.4 trillion. So the odds of you having a bracket busted by an early exit or an upstart Cinderella team are pretty high. When your bracket is "busted" by one or two games it can have significant ramifications on the rest of your bracket. If you had a team picked to go deep, say a 1 seed like Villanova or a 2 seed like Duke (both of which are now out of this year's tournament), and they lose early, then all those wins you picked for them are games you automatically "lose" because the team you picked isn't even in the tournament anymore. At some point many of us get frustrated at how badly our bracket has performed and toss it aside and wait for next March to roll around.

Many times in life this is the same way we see life working out. We make some choices we think will benefit us in the short term or in the long run only to see things not work out the way we hoped. The disappointing part of some of those life busting moments is the continued ramifications we see further down the road. Those poor choices continuing to haunt us days, weeks, and even years later. We feel like we cannot get out from under the weight of the consequences of those poor decisions. 

So what do we do? How do we live with the results of our poor choices and not let it drive us mad? There is an old preacher's illustration that tells how we are to handle these type of life busting situations better than I could ever do. Here it is. "There once was a little boy who found himself in trouble regularly. His father told him that every time he got in trouble, he must hammer a nail into the tree in the back yard. For years the father handed a nail to the boy when he got into trouble. As the boy grew older he found himself hammering fewer and fewer nails until he didn’t hammer them anymore. His father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to stay out of trouble. The days passed and the young man was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the tree. He said, 'You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the tree. The tree will never be the same.'" When our poor choices are made because of our own sinful desires, then our sin is like the nail. Even though the penalty for our sins can be removed, the consequences of our sins stay with us long after the nail has been removed. We can ask for God's forgiveness, either for the first time by trusting in Christ or for the millionth time because of our relationship with Christ. When we do, God will forgive the penalty of our sin, which is separation from Him, and restore us to a right relationship with Him. This doesn't do away with the consequences of our poor choices, we still have to live with them. What forgiveness does is it helps us endure the consequences because of our faith in God and His provision to see us through even the worst of our decisions.


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