Have you ever gotten yourself into a sticky situation? I got myself into a sticky situation a few days ago. I watched countless YouTube videos on extracting honey. I set everything up inside my house so the bees in my yard would not be attracted to the smell of the honey. With the first frame of honey I uncapped, I spilled some honey on the plastic I had put down. Within a matter of moments, I had honey from one end of my house to the other end. My wife, eventually, ran me, the honey combs, and the honey extractor out of the house. She spent hours undoing my sticky mess that only took me a few minutes to make.
Literal sticky situations like I experienced the other day are far and few between, but figurative sticky situations come along more frequently. Figurative sticky situations may be as simple as saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Still some of those figurative sticky situations could be as complex as years upon years of wrong choices in relationships and life-choices. Let's take our example of a complex sticky situation from the Bible.
A person like the younger son from the parable in Luke 15:11-32 made some bad choices. He demanded that his father give him his inheritance. He moved away from his home so he could live a lascivious life with drunkenness and prostitution. At his lowest point, he was feeding pigs and eating from the pigs' food. He was in a terrible place in life. No friends. No family. No food. The young man does something that should be an example for anyone in a sticky situation, both literal and figurative.
He remembered. He repented. He returned. For me in my literal sticky situation, I remembered how difficult it was for my wife to clean the last time I messed up the whole house. I repented in sack cloth and ashes for messing up the whole house. I and the honey returned outside from which we both came. For the young man, he remembered what it was like in his father's house. He repented of his actions. He returned home to his father.
Many of our situations in life, whether they are literal or figurative, sticky situations could be remedied by those simple words. Remember. Repent. Return. So the next time you find yourself covered in honey or eating from a slop bucket, think about those three words: Remember, Repent, and Return.
