Tuesday, October 17, 2023
I should have known better. It was
this past Saturday evening that I stood in front of my wife’s new dresser, my
hand full of the pills I take each day.
I’ve never had the best aim, but, good grief, how can you miss a preacher’s
mouth from one inch away? One of those little
white pills bounced off my chin, hit my shoe, and devilishly-rolled under the
dresser. I got down on my knees in the
dimly-lit room, and regretted it immediately, knowing I’d have to get up, get
the flashlight, and ease those aging bones down on all fours a second
time. I laid my aching body level to the
ground, right in front of the dresser, praying the bones would let me get up
again without calling 911. The
flashlight found the pill…just out of reach!
It was no surprise about the painful relocation of bones, joints, and
marrow, or that I’d have to stretch those arm-bones to lengths they’d never
known to retrieve that wayward pill. What
shocked me was the floor under that recently arrived dresser; it was covered in
more dust bunnies than you’d see chocolate bunnies at Easter. Now you need to know one thing – my wife’s
middle name is White Tornado.
Our kids dubbed her that, because she does pre-emptive strikes on dirt
32-days in the average week. She moves
furniture every time she dusts to clean the unseen (this despite my theory that
bugs unseen are not problematic!).
Call it her blind side, but Elizabeth cannot move that dresser…and the
malicious dust-bunnies know it; they go there to hide, reproduce, and plot. I am convinced the dust bunnies have finally
unionized and targeted our home because of my bride’s unflinching commitment to
dusticide…defined as the systematic, relentless effort to
eliminate all that dusty-particle-scourge from the face of the earth.
Apostle John holds that we humans know about light and darkness, but we more
often choose darkness over the light. A
quick glance at our world’s moral/ethical state, and you have little problem
agreeing with John. We are in a darkness
stronghold, more than the dust-bunny situation under the dresser. (Yeah…get that picture of Elizabeth’s dresser
out of your mind; yours ain’t any better!)
But here we’re talking about our moral dresser. For us, it’s a whole lot easier to live with
that puppy in the darkness. Why is that,
preacher? (For the second day in a row…I’m
glad you asked). We like the darkness,
because we really don’t want to find anything…and we know there are
those things down there.
· Attitudes we should have stifled
· People we wanted to stifle instead of
love
· Good advice we stifled all too often
in favor of the bad stuff we craved
· Things we shouldn’t have done,
including the bad stuff we wanted to do, but never had the time…and the list
goes on.
We like darkness…full-stop! And it’s
because that spot under cover of the dresser-bottom’s darkness hides a
multitude of stuff you can’t see if you don’t look closely. That is precisely why Apostle Paul, giving
advice about how to come to God in worship says we should examine our lives…use a flashlight if necessary to find that bitter pill among the dust
bunnies, and bring it out in the light of confession….and then watch God’s
light of grace shrivel it up and blow it away!
For You Today
There are about 2,600 devotional posts and 400 sermons
in the Rocky Road library.
Title Image Russell Brownworth (own “dusty” work) Images
without citation are in public domain or cited via weblinks.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT©
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