Everything was going perfectly with our house renovations, just in time for our big move this weekend. Finally! After a month of working double time, my husband, Dana, and our older boys had nearly finished laying down 1,200- square-feet of pine floors. I’d finished cleaning the mouse droppings from the cupboards, sweeping cobwebs from the windows, and painting rooms.

We were on the downhill stretch of sorting, tossing, and packing up our home in Bath. And our energy, money, and patience were quickly coming to an end.

As many of life’s difficulties do, what came next began with a small decision that went against an inner inkling. My arms and neck were so sore from painting and my big, pillowy bed was so comfortable, that early one morning when Dana leaned over me to say, “I’m going to the hardware store to pick out the stain for the floor, do you want to come with me?” I pulled the covers tighter and said, “No. Whatever you get will look fine.”

A few days later I showed up at our new house to discover that the upstairs floors were as orange as Ronald McDonald’s hair — fueled by butane. Normally, I’m a “close-enough-let’s-makethe best-of-it” kind of girl. But there was no making the best of this. This was a catastrophe.

Thanks to my momentary decision to forgo what I knew was right — climbing out of bed to pick out a stain color with my husband — Dana now had to refinish the entire upstairs just one week before we were to move in. This would have been somewhat correctible, except pine contains more resin than other woods. So when Dana tried sanding off the florescent pigment, the buffer screens kept gumming up — at 13 bucks a pop. An online search revealed we needed coarser screens, which no local supplier carried. Special ordering the right screens cost more time and money. So, this week, instead of nailing trim and hanging curtains for the big day, we were scrambling to correct our big mistake.

Let’s face it. Often in life the smallest choices produce the biggest problems. Not many people willfully plan to wreck the well-laid base of their lives, but even the smallest choices that go against our inner inkling to do what is right can end with disastrous consequences that no amount of buffing can scrub out. On our own, we merely gum up the results.

Thankfully, when our lives are damaged by the stain of bad choices, Christ offers a fresh start. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come,” the apostle Paul writes in II Corinthians 5:17.

Whether we’ll get our upstairs floors finished in time to set up our beds this weekend — or whether we’ll all be sleeping in the living room — remains to be seen. But thank God, that when it comes to our spiritual condition, we have free access to a heavenly buffer!

MEADOW RUE MERRILL is a Mid-coast Maine writer who shares about God in her everyday life through “Faith Notes.” For more, go to www.meadowrue.com where you can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.