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Everybody's got dirt
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011
At the camp where I work, I have a problem with dirt. The soil is largely composed of a dry, ubiquitous grit, which is sent straight from the devil to torment me. It crawls with me into bed. I wake up tasting it in my mouth. It follows me into my office and dries out the bearings in my rolling chair. I can’t play ping-pong without slipping in it. In the first two weeks of camp, I swept up enough dirt to fill a large mug.
This got me thinking: everybody’s got dirt. You know what I mean. All of us carry dirty little secrets with us—things that we would be ashamed to let anyone else know. It is our pride and our low self-esteem. It is the wound of surviving rape as well as the guilt of being a raging alcoholic. It is unwanted addiction, unwanted pregnancy, and unwanted consequences of poor life choices we’ve made.
These sins, fears, failures, and short-comings haunt our lives. They follow us to bed, wake us up in the morning, travel with us to work, and invade our lives when we relax. Worse still, though we try to hide them, they still make themselves known. They corrupt our marriages and frustrate our friendships; we become irritable, fearful, competitive, guilt-laden, and explosively overprotective because of these secrets. We can’t function normally because we are always wondering if she knows what we’ve been up to, if he can sense our insecurity.
Everybody’s got dirt—there’s no question of that—but I wonder, since it follows us into our relationships anyway, what are we going to do with it? I looked at my mug of sand and asked myself the same question. After a little reflection I planted a cactus.
It’s funny, because you don’t expect sand to be good for much. You can’t build houses on it. It’s not prime farming acreage. Yet you can grow a cactus in it.
The same is true for our sin and brokenness too. One of the paradoxes in God’s kingdom is that good comes from bad. Through death comes life. The weak become powerful. The condemned sinner becomes a redeemed saint.
Because of what Christ did on the cross, sin works backwards. Romans 5:20 says that wherever sin increases, God’s grace increases more. In 2 Corinthians 12:9, God tells Paul that His power is made perfect in weakness.
What is interesting is Paul’s response:
“Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Instead of hiding his shortcomings, he embraces them. He blows off the lid to his ego and says “Look at me! I’m a sinner saved by grace! I’m a product of God’s love!” He doesn’t care what others will think. He rejoices that God shines through him, despite, and because of his weakness.
We also have the same choice. We can live lives of fear, we can pretend to perfect, or we can choose to admit to failure and own up to our mistakes. If we do choose to come clean about who we really are, we not only experience freedom and healing for ourselves, but we are able to help others do the same.
Think for a moment about those caught in chemical co-dependency. Imagine abusing your children while you’re so drunk you don’t even know what you’re doing, and then denying it ever happened. Imagine the fights, the raised voices, the wrenching tears, and finally the divorce, because you can’t stop snorting cocaine and your spouse is afraid of you. Imagine walking from stranger to stranger, bumming cigarettes because you’ve run out of money and still crave a fix. How could you ever find healing when you felt so guilty and shamed and disgusted with yourself that you couldn’t bear to look at yourself in the mirror?
The men at Alcoholics Anonymous know. The women at Narcotics Anonymous know. They share. The wounded people there admit their dirty little secrets and lend their support to people just as broken as themselves. They know exactly how their fellow sinner is suffering because they suffer in the same way. They are able to hold their hand and empathize: “You’re not worthless. I’ve struggled with the same stuff. You can get through this. We’re doing this together.” Their openness leads to intimacy, intimacy leads to love, and love leads to healing.
God’s power is made perfect in weakness. Sin ultimately works backwards. In God’s economy, even a cactus can grow in sand.
So the question still remains: everybody’s got dirt, what are you going to do with yours?
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Comments
Good words