As several of the people closest to me have pointed out, it’s been a while since I’ve written. Life has seemed a bit much for me lately, in both good and not-so-good ways. One of the very, very good ways is through another church that invited me to speak at an event last week-end–a most lovely women’s event. Speaking at this particular church (Sandy Creek is its name) was most meaningful to me because several of the women whom I believe prayed for me the most when I was ill actually go to this church. These women not only prayed, they also visited and sent me and my family more food than I can now remember. And it was indeed an honor to be invited to spend part of a Sunday afternoon with them.
I spoke, as I normally do, about the overwhelming love of our God–a love that cannot be diminished by even our very worst nightmare. We all need to be reminded of this over and over again because, as my little girl pointed out to me very recently, only the “dirty snow” seems to stick around here. Children are so real, so profound, so unfiltered. It’s no wonder God tells us that we must see/come as little children do, that the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. The dirty snow comment was made by my amateur meteorologist during our second big snow of this winter after she observed that there were piles of blackened snow all around, even many days after it had stopped snowing. From the back seat of our car I heard something along the lines of, “The clean, white snow goes away fast. The dirty snow is what sticks so long. Have you noticed that mom?”
My little girl had observed what she thought was a pattern of nature. It didn’t seem to immediately occur to her that the clean, white snow does stick around (in a sense); it sticks around so long, in fact, that it turns into dirty snow. When we talked about that later, her response was, “Oh, that’s too bad, huh?” Yes, that is too bad. And that’s also exactly what happens to us I believe. We start out (though still riddled with sin) much cleaner and “whiter” than most of us end up being down here. We are like snow–the dirt sticks; the things that tend to take root in our hearts and minds, about both ourselves and others, fall into that “dirty snow” category far too frequently I’m afraid. Such is our human nature.
That’s exactly why, as I also pointed out to those lovely women this past Sunday, we must choose not to keep our eyes fixed on ourselves or on others. We must keep them fixed on our standard, on the Standard–on God. And if we’re not sure exactly what God looks like, we need only look at his Christ. Christ came down here to save us, yes, but he also came to show us. He tells us that, if we’ve seen him, we’ve seen the Father. Yes, Jesus is the clearest image we’ll get of God as long as this world is what it is, and it is a “dirty snow” world indeed. And that’s why it’s so very important that we know and remind ourselves and each other that this world hasn’t always been so and it certainly will not always be so.
We will see this world cleaned up in every single way. And that means we’ll see ourselves cleaned up in every single way too. As someone who has struggled her whole life with/against perfectionism, that’s a day I really do look forward to. When I was my daughter’s age, I remember being quite disturbed when I would see beautiful snow move from “perfect” to “dirty.” It just seemed so sad to me. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said that our yearning for that which is perfect is our hunger for God and is further proof that perfection does indeed exist. I’m so very thankful that we don’t have to wait for God to see us like we see clean, white snow. God began seeing us that way the very day we embraced Christ as his Son.
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