Saturday, June 27, 2015

Shadows Shot Through with Light

Sometimes I can see it: great and ugly, the squatting creature that dirties the world, that spreads its stink on all and covers everything in its dark slime. There's nothing it doesn't touch, nothing that remains unsullied by its presence. 

And I hate it. I hate the way it chuckles as it releases its filth, spreading it so seemingly indiscriminately on the world. I want to kill it, murder it and begin to wash the world. 

But the most I can do is try to clean up after it. It's not my job to kill it - as a matter of fact, I have it on good authority it's already dead, and its activities now are simply the death throes, like a chicken thrashing about when its head's been removed. So I clean: I go through the motions of what often seems like futile labor. I scrub a spot clean here, only to look and see that the spot I scrubbed moments before has been rubbed with the creature's excrement again. I go to work. 

Sometimes I can see the progress. Occasionally I'll be able to look up from my cleaning and see the behind me the sparkling trail I'm leaving. But most of the time my head is down; I'm focused in on my work; scrubbing until my hands bleed. It's amazing, actually, how effective blood is as a cleanser. 

Not my blood, though. His. He poured it out, in the battle with the beast where His death sealed the beast's own. He poured out His blood on His people, making them clean. And while the stains remain, I soak in His blood to get them out a little bit more every day, and I keep going back to that blood to scrub out the stains that beast leaves on everything.