Watch Your Step

I recently washed some dried duck poop off of a stroller.  Welcome to fatherhood.  These are the type of things no one warns you about when you become a father.  I started by attacking the poop with a stick, just like dad used to do.  That didn’t work.  I then rubbed it on the ground because that fixes everything.  I even thought about putting a newspaper over it like on Big Daddy but decided against it.  Eventually, I used a miracle wipey thing that Erin bought and it was good as new.  It made me laugh that while I used to consider myself to be a cool guy that my life now consisted of wiping duck poop off of a stroller tire.  But why.  Why did I need to do this?  Simple, the poop was nasty and shouldn’t be there.  I don’t want my daughters fly ride to be ghetto and nasty.  She deserves the best.  Her stroller even has an ipod hook-up so she can jam to her kid music while good old dad huffs and puffs trying to catch his breath.  I started thinking about the poop and I realized it had to be removed.  

In Deuteronomy there are alot of weird laws that make no sense- a lot of them.  But in the 23th chapter, the Bible says that if you have to poop while at camp you should bring a shovel with you and when you poop you should bury it because “the Lord, your God walks in the midst of your camp”.  This makes no sense to me, or it didn’t for many years.  (By the way,  I call this passage doodooronomy the twenty-turd chapter)  

The reason is because God is holy and perfect.  God wants to meet with us, however, we are told to be holy because He is holy.  God’s desire is not for His people (those who have placed their faith and trust in Him alone for salvation) to walk around in poop all day, but rather for His people to be set-apart from all the crap the world has to offer.  We are not called to waller around like a pig in our filth, but to put the poop aside and “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). 

 Often, we make the choice to settle and surround our life in filth and God is telling us to get rid of the filth and fill our lives with peace, love, long suffering, etc.  The biggest problem though is that we are often skirting around the poop as if we are walking across a mine field.  This clouds our judgment makes us unable to focus on the right things.  We see the trash all around us, but not the blessings that are right in front of us.  We are like the plower who looks back to admire his work, only to have the plow lines (I don’t know what these are called) get crooked.  Fortunately in Ecclesiastes we are told that God can take that which is crooked and make it straight.  In my life I lived a life that was far from straight and I was constantly turning off path because my path was being illuminated by my own desires and I wanted nothing to do with God.  Many of us are in the same boat.  We are so busy looking over our shoulder that we cant see the amazing life that God has put before us.  Check out Proverbs 28:1 for more on this.  

Thoughts?