Imagine arriving home at day’s end to find greasy black liquid spreading across the counter, running down the cabinets onto the floor, and soaking into the hallway carpet. A backed-up kitchen sink on the middle floor of a forty-storied apartment building is neither peaceful nor relaxing. 

A quick call brought two men running down the hallway with shop vacs in tow. They quickly drained the sink and toweled the mess — but the sink kept filling up. All twenty apartments above seemed to be draining greasy black dishwater. The dance between emptying the sink and plunging the drain was pure adrenaline, but futile. Plunging was no match for whatever was clogging the drainpipe. 

Finally, they called The Plumber. He arrived with three buckets, a toolbox, and the largest routing machine we’d ever seen. He removed the drainpipe, rammed his router into the wall, and began feeding it into the pipe — ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet . . . 

At fifty feet we heard the gurgle and gush of success. Twenty floors of black, greasy, muckish sludge plunging past our kitchen.

The Plumber didn’t just help us carry buckets of black water to the bathroom. He healed the problem at its source. It was the most visceral demonstration I’ve ever seen of how Jesus Christ forgives our mess and heals our lives. The most important part of the story is to make the call.