Confession #3: Sometimes I mix dirty socks with sacred rags

Don't tell anyone at my church, but it's true.

When I bring home a bag of washcloths and hand towels from our church's free meal ministry, it is so that I can wash them and return them later to be used again. There is never enough to make a full load in my washing machine, so the money-savvy nerd in me is obligated to intermingle them with our family's bleach laundry: dirty socks and...all.

It may sound silly, but that really bothered me the first few times I had to do it. When I was growing up, anything that belonged to the church had a kind of mystical holiness attached to it. From hymnbooks to toilet paper: if it was dedicated to God, I was raised to treat it with reverence. So it follows that even rags that have been consecrated should be treated differently than things from my home that are for common, everyday use.

Thank goodness for bleach.

Because of the addition of bleach, I don't have to worry that my family's dirty sock germs will contaminate the sacred rags. I know that by the time that load of laundry comes out of the dryer, every item will have been sanitized equally. Whether it's a dirty sock left in the backyard after going for a walk in our pond inside my son's tennis shoe, or a sacred rag used to wash a spoon that fed the downtrodden of our community, the end result is clean.

Sometimes, I lift the lid and look down into one of these loads of bleach laundry and watch my life going round and round, like a picture of my own heart. First, a nasty, smelly sock comes to the surface, then a sacred rag, then another sock...the sacred mixing with the dirty. The holy and the common all jumbled and tumbled and rubbing shoulders and sharing lint. The bleach penetrating the fibers of the dirtiest things, killing the odorous bacteria and whisking it away forever. And it makes me smile as I stand and observe the cleansing process. I begin to understand the grace of God in my life just a little bit better.

He delights in intermingling His Holy Spirit in our dirty lives. He allows us to share the gospel with unchurched children one day, lose our tempers with our own kids the next, and still be called His own. He revels in the purifying, refining, two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of transforming our dirty socks into sacred rags.

He throws his head back and laughs in the face of evil when He uses someone like me to defeat it.

Have you ever noticed that God has a history of taking a strange but wonderful pleasure in using the most unlikely people to do fantastic things? Just look at the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1. The list of notable women in Jesus' family tree is fascinating: Tamar, who had to scratch and scrape and deceive her way to motherhood; Rahab, the lying prostitute from Jericho; Ruth, the childless, needy, clinging gentile widow; and Bathsheba, the apparently willing adulteress who lost her first child, conceived in sin.

All of these dirty women, thrown aside by their own people as common, were seen as precious in the eyes of our God. And somehow in the miracle of His redemption, He mixed His holiness with their humanness and presented hope to the world. And in doing that, He brings hope to my world.

Only God can make dirt holy.

When God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, He commanded him to take off his sandals, because the place where he was standing was holy ground. Maybe Moses was surprised. Just a moment before, the place where he was standing had been just...ground. Just dirt. There was nothing holy or even notable about it. But when the presence of God descended and saturated that patch of dirt, everything changed. Moses threw off his sandals and fell to the ground in worship.

God makes prostitutes holy. He makes dirt holy. He makes me holy. I throw up my hands, and I worship.