After a wonderful restful day yesterday spending Mother’s Day with my two favorite guys in the world, my husband and my son (even though we spent the majority of time in the car driving to and back from Millington on a Navy uniform run), I must have felt energetic this morning when I woke up and decided to clean my shower.
At the risk of letting everyone in the world know what a bad housekeeper I am, I have to confess that it has been a while since the shower in our master bathroom has had a good scrubbing. I mean, the walls have been wiped down occasionally, but it hasn’t had a good elbow-grease kind of clean anytime recently. And it was time. It was VERY much time.
As I took stock of the situation, I decided that besides the shower walls, the drain also looked a little worse for wear. With the words I’m always saying to my son – “A job worth doing is worth doing right!” – I followed my own advice, grabbing a screwdriver from the garage to take off the drain cover. (Don’t you always just feel that more self-sufficient when you’re unscrewing or screwing in a nail? But I digress…)
Oh. My. Word.
Words fail to really convey to you the horror of what I saw, but I’ll just condense it for you: ooey, gooey, grimey, sludgey… I think you get the idea. GROSS!
Though the thought that I would now have to clean all of that grossness won the “Most disgusting” award for the day (which also beckoned my husband to come and stand behind me and offer a supportive “I love you” in a “I’m so glad you’re doing that and not me” tone), coming in a close second was the notion that we had been standing over that disgustingness for weeks (okay, months)! Again, I have to say, GROSS!
So I donned my trusty kitchen gloves I always wear when dealing with icky jobs. I got down on my knees. And I scrubbed. And got the incredible ickiness out. And rinsed. And cleaned and scrubbed some more. And pretty soon that drain, along with the rest of the shower, looked a whole lot better.
That experience this morning makes me wonder: what does God see when He looks beneath the surface of my life? What does He see when He removes the cover we so often keep in place with others? Does he see clean? Or does he see sludge?
I so want Him to see a spotless heart, a beautiful spirit, a perfectly clean mind and body. But I know that doesn’t happen. Not always. Certainly not as often as I wish.
My life gets dirty. My spirit gets sludgy. Too much worry, selfishness, and strife can cause grimey buildup in my heart that requires cleaning. Scrubbing. A new cleansing with His love.
Omar Hamada is a doctor who spent 15 years in the military with 10 of those in the Special Forces. I’ve never met him in person but he, his wife Tara, and their small group from their church have helped me and Wives of Faith a couple of times when we’ve had wives who needed help around the house while their husbands were deployed. Omar sent an email out this morning with a great piece of wisdom that I think applies to what I’m talking about in this post. Here’s what he writes:
I want to ask you a question that I’ve been wrestling with over the past couple of weeks. It seems that in the busyness of life at home, it’s easy to ignore, not think about, actually forget about. But in the quiet loneliness of a hotel room, it screams at me. In the absence of children’s laughter mixed with the frustration of defiance and disobedience, without the nagging of constant email and the ringing of phones, without being tied to such a strict schedule of daily chores and carpool lines, God’s quiet voice speaks.How aware are you of God’s constant presence in your life? How often do you speak to Him? Really? We know He’s in our heart, but how much does He control our lives? When was the last time you really talked to Him? I don’t mean, “when was the last time you asked Him for something?”. I meant, “When did you last commune with Him with no other agenda save to get to know Him?” When was the last time you sat in still quietness to do nothing other than listen to His voice?
It takes a while to clear our minds of all our “to do’s”. We drift easily into day-dreaming and have to refocus ourselves onto the task at hand. It’s like talking to our spouses in some ways. Our minds so easily drift onto tangential highways that it takes effort sometimes to focus on what it is that is really being communicated. It usually takes me a few minutes to stop thinking about my to do’s, Tara, the kids, my dreams, my hurts, my embarrassments, my deadlines……and just, well, just quietly sit there and listen, and pray, and not ask for anything other than His Spirit to fill my life, His presence to take over my soul, His word to overwhelm my entire being.
Focusing on being in God’s presence will certainly cleanse us from the sludge life brings us. I want to encourage you to focus on Him today. Ask Him what lies beneath. Ask Him to remove the grime and replace it with His pure love. And trust that He will do it today.
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