As several of the people closest to me have pointed out, it’s been a while since I’ve written.\u00a0 Life has seemed a bit much for me lately, in both good and not-so-good ways.\u00a0 One of the very, very good ways is through another church that invited me to speak at an event last week-end–a most lovely women’s event.\u00a0 Speaking at this particular church (Sandy Creek is its name) was most meaningful to me because several of the women whom I believe prayed for me the most when I was ill actually go to this church.\u00a0 These women not only prayed, they also visited and sent me and my family more food than I can now remember.\u00a0 And it was indeed an honor to be invited to spend part of a Sunday afternoon with them.<\/p>\n
I spoke, as I normally do, about the overwhelming love of our God–a love that cannot be diminished by even our very worst nightmare.\u00a0 We all need to be reminded of this over and over again because, as my little girl pointed out to me very recently, only the “dirty snow” seems to stick around here.\u00a0 Children are so real, so profound, so unfiltered.\u00a0 It’s no wonder God tells us that we must see\/come as little children do, that the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.\u00a0 The dirty snow comment was made by my amateur meteorologist during our second big snow of this winter after she observed that there were piles of blackened snow all around, even many days after it had stopped snowing.\u00a0 From the back seat of our car I heard something along the lines of, “The clean, white snow goes away fast.\u00a0 The dirty snow is what sticks so long.\u00a0 Have you noticed that mom?”<\/p>\n
My little girl had observed what she thought was a pattern of nature.\u00a0 It didn’t seem to immediately occur to her that the clean, white snow does stick around (in a sense); it sticks around so long, in fact, that it turns into dirty snow. \u00a0When we talked about that later, her response was, “Oh, that’s too bad, huh?”\u00a0 Yes, that is too bad.\u00a0 And that’s also exactly what happens to us I believe.\u00a0 We start out (though still riddled with sin) much cleaner and “whiter” than most of us end up being down here.\u00a0 We are like snow–the dirt sticks; the things that tend to take root in our hearts and minds, about both ourselves and others, fall into that “dirty snow” category far too frequently I’m afraid.\u00a0 Such is our human nature.<\/p>\n
That’s exactly why, as I also pointed out to those lovely women this past Sunday, we must choose not to keep our eyes fixed on ourselves or on others.\u00a0 We must keep them fixed on our standard, on the Standard–on God.\u00a0 And if we’re not sure exactly what God looks like, we need only look at his Christ.\u00a0 Christ came down here to save us, yes, but he also came to show us.\u00a0 He tells us that, if we’ve seen him, we’ve seen the Father.\u00a0 Yes, Jesus is the clearest image we’ll get of God as long as this world is what it is, and it is a “dirty snow” world indeed.\u00a0 And that’s why it’s so very important that we know and remind ourselves and each other that this world hasn’t always been so and it certainly will not always be so.<\/p>\n
We will see this world cleaned up in every single way.\u00a0 And that means we’ll see ourselves cleaned up in every single way too.\u00a0 As someone who has struggled her whole life with\/against perfectionism, that’s a day I really do look forward to.\u00a0 When I was my daughter’s age, I remember being quite disturbed when I would see beautiful snow move from “perfect” to “dirty.”\u00a0 It just seemed so sad to me.\u00a0 I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said that our yearning for that which is perfect is our hunger for God and is further proof that perfection does indeed exist.\u00a0 I’m so very thankful that we don’t have to wait for God to see us like we see clean, white snow.\u00a0 God began seeing us that way the very day we embraced Christ as his Son.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As several of the people closest to me have pointed out, it’s been a while since I’ve written.\u00a0 Life has seemed a bit much for me lately, in both good and not-so-good ways.\u00a0 One of the very, very good ways is through another church that invited me to speak at an event last week-end–a most […] <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6VlK3-2L","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.angeladentonfoss.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}