“Muddy Holes and Swimming Pools”

One terribly hot summer day on Bull Run Road, when my sisters and I were three little tomboys with a lot of time on our hands, we decided to build ourselves a swimming pool behind my daddy’s tractor shed. We must’ve dug most of the afternoon before Cyndie, my oldest sister and consequently the foreman, deemed the hole to be large enough. The three of us pulled the water hose over to the hole and turned on the faucet. I still remember our disappointment when a muddy hole developed instead of the crystal blue pool we’d envisioned. Poor little girls, as hard as we had worked on our dirty little trench it was still nothing more than that, a filthy container.

It’s easy to laugh at our ignorance, but there’s a symbolism in that story that’s all too common. Over and over we try to clean up on our own. Sometimes our wrong-thinking is about trying to give up our bad habits and obsessions with this world’s dirt through our own strength. Other times it is our misguided effort to try and filter our own “stuff” during our devotional time, to diligently inspect our souls for anything we need to ask forgiveness for, so we can pray, worship, or otherwise experience God. All such self-efforts that focus on us instead of Christ, our Savior, our Mediator, our Access are doomed to fail. We’re simply incapable of creating a reservoir clean enough for God’s glory or keeping ourselves clean. Christ came to show us the way. I like the way John says it in I John 1:7, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin.”

God bids us come, abide in Him, and trust Him to do the keeping. He’s the only one that can clean our containers, prepare them for His glory, fill and refill them with Living Water. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Hugs,
Shellie