Good Monday Morning (6-07-10),

As I pursue my walk, seeking God and that path He has prepared for me, I continue to ask Him to search me and know me and create a clean heart in me.

This is my way of asking God to reveal those hidden things that are not pleasing to Him. Our modern church culture has a way of avoiding this. How often have you heard, “Don’t ask God for patience, because He just might give it to you”?

Well, we need patience. The truth behind that admonition is that we very rarely conform to God’s ways without some tweeking, pruning, or chastising, all of which might include a measure of suffering as God refines us and purifies us so that we become like fine gold or forged iron…valuable and strong.

The harsh undeniable fact is that to be transformed into the image of Christ is a process incorporating a certain amount of unpleasantness. Seeing the sludge that pollutes our heart can be downright painful. But, if we want to be purified and clean, the sludge has to go.

If we run when things get difficult, when our inner selves are revealed, when we don’t like what we see, when things become uncomfortable…we will never be forged into the powerful Christ-like entity God intended.

Put another way — we will never encounter, embrace, and fulfill our destiny. Is a little (or a lot) of pain worth that? It’s a question each one of us must answer.

This truth came home hard last week while I tended my store. A man entered and asked if he could use my facilities. He smiled politely, was clean cut and cleanly dressed, and I directed him to the appropriate place.

Not three minutes later another man entered my store. This man was not clean. He was not clean cut nor cleanly dressed and he barely appeared to be in his right mind. I’m not saying he was drooling…but it was a close call. He asked if I had a bathroom he could use.

I’d like to be able to say I treated both men the same way. Not only would I look a lot better if I had, but I’d feel a lot better about the incident. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon how you view things, I immediately began pointing out all the other bathroom facilities in the town that were not in my building.

Here’s the funny part (not ha-ha). As soon as the second man closed my door and limped crookedly down the street the first man came back through the front door. Last I’d seen him he had been heading toward the back of my store. Evidently he had exited the rear of the building, through a locked door. His reason for returning? To profusely thank me for my kindness in allowing him the use of my facilities.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

I’m baring my soul in public because there is a profound ending to this story. I wouldn’t swear these two disparate souls were angels, but I wouldn’t bet against the probability. All I know is that, later in the day, the revelation of the darkness in my own heart pained me so badly I could barely function.

Every once in a while God, in His infinite mercy, in response to my request, reveals something in me that I really don’t want to see. I call this mercy because, ugly as these revelations are, I’d rather the ugliness was outside me than left inside to taint God’s goodness, to hinder His work.

It is true that my spirit was reborn into an entirely new creation the moment I was saved. But my soul — the thinking part of me that can be deterred by pride, bound by prejudice, weakened by cowardice, disfigured by envy — my soul needs to be transformed. And this is not always, not usually, a pretty sight.

As soon as I could get alone I got on my knees. I thanked God for His immense love; that He would take the time to show me something I would not have believed was there. I laid my grief at His feet, knowing that in Christ all things are possible — even the transformation of myself into a person who can walk and act in love.

Forgiveness and acceptance washed over me. Pain fled before that Light.

Do I wish I’d acted right the first time? Oh yes. But, uncomfortable as it was, I’m one step closer to being transformed into the image of Jesus. And that is a great relief.

“For if a person comes into your congregation whose hands are adorned with gold rings and who is wearing splendid apparel, and also a poor man in shabby clothes comes in, and you pay special attention to the one who wears the splendid clothes and say to him, Sit here in this preferable seat while you tell the poor man, Stand there, or, Sit there on the floor at my feet. Are you not discriminating among your own and becoming critics and judges with wrong motives?” James 2:2-4

Laurie Gross