ash and shards

Have you ever just had a series of unfortunate events in your life that caused you to have to laugh or else you might just cry? Of course you have....It seems the Lord loves to make living epistles out of life, letters telling others of His greatness and His plan. His story is written on everything, everywhere, if we just look for it.
Last week, a friend of mine was cleaning out her fireplace. It was filled with soot and needed to be cleaned, so she decided to get the shop vac and suck the soot out of the fireplace. About 3 minutes into the task, she realized that the shop vac was sucking the soot out of the fireplace and blowing it out the top of the vaccuum, all over the living room. Now the soot was not just in her fireplace, but everywhere. All over her walls, her furniture. Overwhelmed by the enormity of soot that was now EVERYWHERE, she had to decide how to clean it all up. It was on the walls, the floor, behind the cushions. She found it three rooms away, resting on doorways, picture frames, air vents and tables. In her quest to clean the fireplace, there are now remnants of ash everywhere. You sit on the furniture and turn black. You walk on the floor, you turn black. And as hard as she tries to clean it up...remnants of ash still remain, unseen until she sits, touches or walks and then it is too late, it is already on her. She has washed everything down, but it is impossible to see or remove it all.
Later that week, one of my kids closed the sliding glass door and knocked a candle on the floor. The glass shattered and went everywhere. The shards were scattered all over my kitchen. I immediately got the vaccuum and began to clean it up. Being careful to remove all the pieces, cleaning a further radius out than I thought was needed, I was certain I had removed all the shards of glass. That is, until two days later, when I looked down on the carpet, down the hallway and realized there was a shard of glass. I realized that no matter how thorough I was, I couldn't get it all up or clean. I couldn't see all the shards to get them all up, much like my friend can not see where all the soot is.
Then it hit me. Shards, remnants of ash-God was teaching me. Sin is just like the ash. You think you are cleaning it up and before you know it, it is everywhere. It spreads to places we can not see. It touches areas that we had no idea it would reach. It gets all over people-the remnants of our sin effect others, even in the clean up.
But life is like the glass shards too. Although the ash just clings to us and turns us black, the glass shards can cut and hurt. Our sin is also like the shards, if we don't get it all clean, someone is going to get cut up by our sin. And just like the ash, the shards end up in places that we never thought they could, places we didn't even think to clean because didn't know that it would land there.
I was thinking about sin and how it clings to us, cuts us and takes us further than we ever thought we could go, does more damage then we ever could have imagined and effects more than just ourselves and I realized, again, my inability to clean up sin is just like the inability to clean up the ash or the shards. Oh, we can try to clean up. We can try to make things look better to the naked eye. We can pretend that we have done a good job and deceive ourselves into thinking things look okay because we can not see the dirt. But then someone walks by and our sin clings to them or they step on a shard and they get cut. Then, our world comes down because what we thought was dead and buried rises from the ash only to further effect us and those we love, leaving stains and cuts that we had no idea were even possible because we thought we had done a good job.
We can try to do a good job cleaning up our mess, but honestly, we are unable to do what only God can. God is the only one that can say "Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool." (Isaiah 1:18) He is the only one who can clean us up. So maybe it is time we stop trying to cover our sin or clean up our sin and simply run to the one who can take all of our sins and wash us, cleanse us from all iniquity and purify our souls. Because honestly, if we don't...our sin is just going to keep rubbing off on everyone else and cutting others up.
ALL FOR YOU