Lessons from Spilled Milk

It has been said, "There is no use crying over spilled milk."  The general thrust of this proverb is that life is too short to live with regret.  The message is meant to prompt us to make quick work of the clean up, and to quickly return to our task.  Almost every day there is "spilled milk" in our lives.  Whether it is something spoken that should not have been or something left undone, it is difficult to make it through a day without some sort of mistake.

Actually, it is humanly impossible to make it through a day without committing some error.  We sin daily.  There are sins we commit in willful rebellion, and sins we commit in ignorance.  We sin when we do what we should not do (sins of commission), and we sin when we don't do what we should do (sins of omission).  Paul states it succinctly, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23).  We also make many mistakes that are not sin.  While it may be a sin to hit someone over the head with a frying pan, it is not a sin to drop a frying pan in the floor (unless you have just hit someone over the head with it, then it might be a sin).

We often assume that if we could remove the sin element from our lives, we would also remove the mistakes along with them.  However, removing sin would not necessarily remove mistakes (of a non-sinful nature).  Furthermore, it isn't helpful to image a world without sin, because that is not the world we live in and it will not be the world we live in until Christ's return.  Sin is an ever-present reality with which we must contend.

The temptation is to remove the human element, or at least to remove ourselves from as much human contact as possible.  For this reason, some in the early church went out into the desert and lived as hermits.  Others have entered monasteries or convents in the pursuit of holiness.  These pursuits end with a fractured holiness, because they can never produce wholeness.  We were created to be social creatures, who grow best as we interact with each other.

The spilled milk of life gives us the opportunity to be tried and tested.  It shows us what we are made of and where we still need to grow.  Sometimes the milk is spilled by others, but we still have to clean it up.  Other times, we spill the milk, but we spill so much we need help to clean it up.  If we approach each spill as an opportunity to grow, to learn, to become holier, and more like Christ, then we find spilled milk is really something that we should sing over.