The popular movie “Forrest Gump” is about a man, ironically named, Forrest Gump. Most of us would consider him slow, not having the mentality of a person his age, but in many ways that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Numerous times in the movie he would say “Mama always said, life is like a box of chocolates”. To this day I’m still not sure exactly what that means, he certainly did.
When I was younger I slammed the car door on my thumb. The whole nail turned black and took a long time to completely fall off. After a while you could actually pop the blackened nail up to reveal the new nail growing underneath. Honestly, I really enjoyed freaking my fellow classmates when I did that! The nail grew back and when it did, it was, and still is, slightly “disfigured”, one part of the cuticle it is slightly higher than the rest. Although currently it isn’t as noticeable as it used to be, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
More recently (I wrote this in November) I slammed the same thumb in a safe door, but this time only a portion of it turned black. The entire nail didn’t fall off but I could clearly see the black grow out and there was even a hole between the old and new nail.
As I look at it today, the black is almost gone and the cuticle isn’t quite as white as the rest. Just another battle scar to the cuticle than there used to be, but it’s only noticeable to me.
What I am finally getting to is that the nails grew out and new ones replaced them.
I realized this morning that life is like fingernails. The black that we may feel in our lives, grows out over time and we have a clean brand new slate.
Similar to a bad hair cut, it takes a while, much longer than we want it to, but it does grow out. If we don’t dwell on it and replay the “horror” of what we felt at the time we can put it in the past and begin anew.
Hopefully we learn from the past and get a new stylist or choose a cut that will be more suited to our hair type. We may have been warned that it won’t work for us but maybe we insisted and learned the hard way.
The slate, whether it is nails or hair, is “clean” once again.
Now finally to the reason that I’m writing this, this is exactly what God does for us.
It doesn’t matter what we have done in the past, today is not the past, today is a new day.
More importantly, all we have to do is ask for forgiveness and it is ours.
Katy Manning Schutte
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