Dirty

In the foothills of North Carolina, snow is rare. When it snows overnight you can catch the sunrise the next morning revealing a totally different landscape.

Fresh snow is beautiful but that beauty won’t last long.  Even before the temperature rises above 32 degrees, work is being done to clear the roads and sidewalks so we can get back to some semblance of “normal.”  As the snow is removed, it is piled along the sides of roads and the perimeters of parking lots.  It doesn’t take long after the roads are cleared for these piles of snow to become covered with dirt and debris.  These massive dirty piles of snow accent the landscape quite differently from the snow’s purity that first morning.

Not unlike a fresh snow, we all begin as beautiful works of art in God’s eyes.  If we could pause time, we would remain perfect, but our Creator has a much greater purpose for each of us…Life.  Like that fresh snow, we will get pushed around and we will collect dirt.  At first glance, we won’t resemble those original works of art much, but just below the surface we are still 100%, and God doesn’t pay much attention to that surface debris.

Throughout Jesus’ lifetime, Judaism was a culture completely obsessed with cleanliness.  Practically all of one’s perceived value in God’s eyes was intricately connected to cleanliness and much like today, life delivered a fair share of debris.  Avoiding the dirt was a life-consuming and often hopeless task. Through Jesus, God presents a radical shift away from this way of thinking about and approaching both God and each other.

Few would disagree that we live in a culture obsessed with surface level evaluation and we are all in some way dirty piles of snow.  The Gospel is intended to set us free—beyond that dirt—and there are many stories showing how Jesus saw greater beauty within people than anyone else could perceive.  We have to look beyond the surface to recognize the true value in ourselves and in one another.  

We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18 CEB