November 10, 2014

Reflections

Olivia had made a mess, a really big mess, and instead of asking for help or alerting me to the problem, she was trying to handle it herself.

I entered the kitchen and found my daughter sitting on the floor, paper towels in hand, trying to clean up the white pasty mess while milk trickled off the island counter onto my cookbooks on the bookshelf below. Her weapons of mass destruction were milk and a box of biscuit mix. The entire kitchen was covered with splatters, and a three-foot slathering of goo was splayed across the floor.

Olivia was unable to take care of the mess herself, so I took over. I got my little bucket, some rags, hot water, my miracle cleaner, Mr. Clean, and got down on my hands and knees.

I started by cleaning off the floor space and then, one by one, cleaned and dried the cookbooks. After I removed the visible goo, a closer examination with my hand told me there was still a silt residue on the floor. I had to go back over everything and clean it again. Just when I thought I was done, I discovered there was now a biscuit mix “grout” in between the planks of the wooden floor. So I got a toothpick and edged out the crevices as deep down as I could. Again, I wiped down the floor, and finally it was clean!31 1 6 0 1

As I was cleaning I realized I couldn’t clean up the whole mess at once. In life I sometimes have problems I can’t fix myself. When I turn the problem over to God, I think I have the problem licked, but the residue of sin is still in my life, and I have to let Jesus come back for a second cleaning. Then, when I think I am perfectly clean, Jesus points out the sin that still hides in the nooks and the crannies and starts digging it out. That is the painful part, removing the root of the sin.

Sometimes I just want a quick fix, and don’t want to allow Him to completely remove the sin. I know God will never do more work in my life than I invite Him to, but He has made provisions—through His death, burial, and resurrection—to one day completely remove sin forever, and until that time He has provided the cleaning supplies to wipe sin out of my life.

Olivia had made the mess, but I couldn’t leave her to do the cleanup—that would have resulted in an even bigger mess. I couldn’t insist that she help me either. This was something I made her walk away from and let me handle all alone. I realized sometimes that is what God wants me to do, give Him the problem and let Him handle it—in His time and in His way. Let Him do what He sees fit to get me out of the mess I am in; He is just waiting for me to surrender my will completely and trust Him implicitly.

When I was finished cleaning, I dumped the dirty water. Settled in the bottom of the bucket was the silt left over from Mr. Clean breaking down the goo. Micah 7:19 says that God will have compassion on His people, dissolve our sins, and cast them into the depths of the sea. When I poured that silt down the drain, it reminded me of the promise that one day God will have cleaned up all our messes, and sin will be gone.

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