My daughter poops.
I would apologize for such a blatant statement, but she does not, therefore neither shall I.
But yes, my daughter poops, and not in the toilet. She does her business in the everyday wear of a diaper. We have a fantastic invention to collect the used diapers that we lovingly call the “poop bucket”, although I think the actual term is the Diaper Champ or something uncreative like that. The purpose of this container is to collect the dirty diapers so that your trash can does not regularly smell like poop. That is the plus side. The down side of this foul, waste-carrying, stench receptacle is that whenever it is cracked open the tiniest bit it unleashes the most deadly, unforgiving smell that is something akin to hundreds of dirty diapers trapped in one place over 10 months. Oh wait, that’s exactly what it is.
To make matters worse, our beautiful, joyful, curious daughter likes to open this repository-from-gehenna and unleash its abysmal stink with apparently no shame whatsoever. One minute she’s beebopping around pulling shoes and books off shelves and making cute noises, next minute she has let the reek of death out of it’s cage. At least she’s not pulling it’s guts out.
Why this story? Well bathroom humor is always funny, and I thought this would be an effective form of birth control. Also this is a perfect picture of what we do with our sin.
In the eyes of our loving Father our sins are infinitely worse than the built up stank of a million diapers trapped in diaper jail. What’s amazing is that this knowledge does not make Him love us any less. In fact, He is at the ready to help us change our dirty diapers every time we soil ourselves (forgive our sins). And we need to let God change us. George MacDonald writes, “The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of man.” So at the very least we need to let God wipe us clean.
What we, like my insatiably curious daughter tend to do, however, is open the pail back up. God helps us to clean ourselves from the mess we’ve made and once He sets us down clean and new, we go right to the bucket and let the stink into the room.
And this is why God came: not simply to wipe away our past sins, but to teach us how to stop filling our diapers.
MacDonald continues, “This is what He came to deliver us from—not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore.”
Too often we are content in the forgiveness of our past sins, in the correction of old mistakes, but we neither feel guilt nor a compulsion to cease future ones. And God is faithful, He will forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9), but the sole purpose of salvation is not to cover up our past, it is to free our future.
I long for the day Clara is potty-trained (we were shooting for next week), the day she stops making the same old messes. I am patient in the meantime, but our goal as parents is to teach her how to be clean. And how much more does our perfect Father in Heaven?
Brothers and sisters, let’s stop soiling ourselves and pretending it’s okay because we know that God will clean us up. The Christian life is not settling for a passing grade, it’s aiming and achieving the perfection exampled for us in Christ. Stop opening the pail.
