Today’s scripture: (NRSV) (The Message) (KJV) What might God be saying to me?
My thoughts (Brent Walsh):
In my fifteen years as a truck driver, I have seen many a bug-filled windshield! I’m usually meticulous about cleaning the windows. It annoys me to have to peer through bug splatter and road grime to try to see the highway! After a few years of struggling, I finally learned a little trick about how to clean a windshield quickly and easily. If you use dish soap as the washing medium on your squeegee, your windows will be bug-free, grime-free, and streak-free! It works great! (Try to make sure you do this when you have someone in the car you want to impress. Your date will marvel at your genius!)
Most of my experience with washing windows has been in the early morning hours after a long night on the road. When driving at night, it’s surprising how little you notice on the windshield. You may notice a few bugs, but the darkness does a great job of making a dirty windshield appear to be relatively clean.
When the sun starts coming up, though, your windshield is saturated with light and it looks horrible! You see where the windshield wipers tried to wipe away the grime, but only smeared it more! What happened? It’s not like it didn’t exist before — it’s just that now everything is revealed in the light of the sunrise.
I was talking to my friend Doody at church one day about this very subject. She pointed out that this is the same thing that happens to us. Before we knew Jesus, we might not have worried too much about all the shady dealings we engaged in. We might have justified our lying and cheating and manipulation because everyone around us was doing the same thing. When we live in darkness, everything looks pretty clean. We are good people, after all, compared to those scoundrels we hang out with!
But when Jesus comes in and the Son starts to rise, the grime in our souls and the crud in our hearts look dirtier and dirtier until we can hardly see through it! We can see where the wipers of justification tried to clean everything, but it’s all too clear now that nothing was cleaned at all — everything just got distorted. Now we look at things differently and we wonder how we ever got along in life that way!
Thought for the day: When the windshield on your car starts looking like a bug cemetery, take a moment to reflect on how our lives looked before the Son came up and how much clearer we can see now that Jesus has used some heavy-duty dish soap to wash us clean!
We encourage you to include a time of prayer with this reading. If you need a place to get started, consider the guidelines on the How to Pray page.