Lynn H. Blackburn

I hate carpet for one reason.

You can’t clean it.
You can get most of the spots out. But they’ll come
back.

Because they weren’t ever really gone.

And
that’s why I love the hardwood floors in my house.

Herds
of small children can run around carrying cups of purple grape juice and I don’t
care.
Babies can leak. I don’t care.
Adults can drop pizza, toppings
down. I don’t care.

Because when handfuls of potato chips are crushed by
tiny tootsies, it’s no big deal. A broom, maybe the mop. And, voila! Clean
floors.

But—I
have discovered one problem with my floors.

While the epic spills are
easy to clean, the day-to-day droplets of life are a little trickier.

I
can dust, sweep, and mop every square inch of my downstairs, and then the light
streams through a window and I see it . . . a streak a foot
long.

How did I miss it?

I’ve learned over the
past few months that I have to clean my floors during the middle of a sunny day.
I open all the blinds, and if you could see me you’d think I was setting up a
putt at the Master’s. I walk around my living room, squatting down, leaning from
side to side, checking the angles.

I haven’t lost my mind.

I’m looking for the spots.

I have to hunt them
down. And once the light shines on them, I attack.

But no matter how
thorough I try to be, I always find more spots.

As I was tackling one of these
random spots with a damp paper towel, I thought about how easy it is for me to
see the spots in other people’s lives. Their judgmental nature. Their
negativity. Their harsh spirit. Their sin.

But until the Light
shines on their spots, they can’t see them.

It dawned on me
that in most cases, instead of nagging, I need to be praying. I need to leave
the light shining up to The Light. When He’s ready to shine His Light on a spot,
He’ll do it.

Very spiritual of me,
huh?

Yeah.

I’m embarrassed to tell you that I had mulled
this idea over for a couple of weeks before it occurred to me that
maybe—just maybe—there might be spots in MY life that I can’t see. That maybe
instead of worrying about the obvious spots of others, I ought to be praying for
the Light to shine on my own spots.

It’s easy for me to see the
big spots of my epic failures.

But the spots that build up over
the course of the day—the bad attitudes, the pride, the selfishness, the unkind
words—are harder to see and so much easier to ignore. I could spend a lifetime
trying in my own strength to make myself shiny and spot-free.

But
I’ve realized that my heart is just like my floor.

It can only
be cleaned in the bright Light of the Son.

Psalm 51:10 ~ Create in me
a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. (ESV)