Sealed for Your Protection

Honey bear

I was so excited to eat some honey I had bought the other day. It was in one of those little plastic bears and actually made locally. I took the cap off and begin to squeeze some on my toast but nothing came out. So I squeezed little harder, nothing until…Splat! Honey everywhere!

You’ve seen those “sealed for your protection” things that are on almost everything? They’re even on toilets. The little plastic bear’s sweet contents were sealed for my protection, but it didn’t work too well.

As I was cleaning up the sticky mess, the thought came to me how certain people remind me of that little honey bear. They have wonderful things inside them, but they are sealed off from everyone and everything. And when you try to extract some of the good things in them, if you’re not careful you will have a mess on your hands.

We tend to seal ourselves off from others when we’ve been hurt and are in some kind of pain as a result. Pain has a way of sealing us off from things, places, and people that remind us of what hurt us. And when and if we do start to open up it’s often mixed with bitterness and anger.  That’s exactly what we see happening with the children of Israel when God began to take them out of Egypt. 

Pain unsealed

Instead of trusting God’s instructions through Moses, Israel was frightened and wanted things to go back to how they were. The pain of years of slavery and being under their heavy-handed taskmasters began to speak…

“When they saw the Egyptians marching after them and were very afraid, and they said to Moses, ‘Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die?  Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, “Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians”? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!’” (Exodus 14:10-12, NIV)

Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly, and if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place. God wants to remove the seal of pain and release our hopes and dreams. 

It may be a little messy at first as your protective seal comes off your life, but that’s okay…I know somebody who’s got some experience cleaning things up.