CLEANING Saturday, January 25, 2014 Since we’re leasing our house, the property management company comes once a year to assess how well we’ve taken care of the property. We got an email recently that he would be by this past Friday to do his assessment. We caught a break when we had our one day of winter in San Antonio and it was too icy to get out. Some time back, we’d dropped the housecleaner in a budget cutting effort. We did the best we could to keep things in order but, with both of us working, it’s amazing how quickly things can get out of sorts. With two Golden Retrievers, no matter how hard we try, we keep finding these ghostly amber-colored balls of retriever hair floating across the dark hardwood floor. Then, there is the dust. We change the air filters regularly but we can’t compete with South Texas dirt and the Mountain Cedar season. You could grow onions on top of the dresser in the cedar pollen alone. Finally, this past week, when it was time for the assessment, we decided to take the hit and have the house professionally cleaned. It took the lady four hours and we even left two rooms off of her cleaning list. She wasn’t being rude, just honest, when she told me that my office had gotten a little fuzzy. That’ was her word. No matter how hard I try to keep things organized, the fuzzies still attack all hours of the day and night. Kind of reminds me of my soul. No matter how much I confess, sin still collects to my soul like dog hair to my dark black dress winter coat. Everywhere I go, I have to make sure I don’t take the dogs with me. Even if I have dogs, it’s important that I keep that a secret when I wear the coat. There are things we don’t mind people knowing about us and then there are the other things. We all have the other things. I’m with first-century Paul, I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death” (Romans 7:21-24)? Here was a first century Jesus follower deeply conflicted by the commitment he had made to Jesus that didn’t come with an automatic weak-flesh sin-collecting dispenser. Conflicted because what he most deeply wanted, to follow Jesus, didn’t mean he’d automatically get what he wanted. Or, there is sixteenth-century Anglican priest John Donne, praying his confession in the old English of that day. “Wilt thou forgive that sinne where I begun, which was my sinne, though it were donne before? Wilt thou forgive that sinne, through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore” (John Donne, “A Hymne to God”)? Christians are often accused of being hypocrites. That may be in part because we’ve misled people into believing that being a Christian means we’ve stopped sinning. The message we should communicate more clearly is that we’ve invited Someone into our lives to help us with the dilemma of sin that never ends. We’ve discovered forgiveness and are seeking a power to overcome sin that we’ll never fully grasp in this lifetime. We’re not exusing ourselves, just confessing. It may be our lack of confession that gets us into trouble with the unbelieving world. That’s why we have to call in the house cleaner sometimes. Like every day, every hour. Jealously, lust, greed, inappropriate anger, selfishness, undisciplined behavior, addictions, laziness, arrogance, racial judgment – all of it and then some lie in wait at every corner. It would be nice to live a life in which the dust didn’t collect on our fine furniture. The truth is, we have to live in a dusty world where we are not immune to the dirt that collects in everyone else’s life. That’s just the way it is. Confession is, or should be, as much a part of our lives as taking the next dusty breath.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 16:23:04 +0000
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