Dog Poop Gospel

It constantly amazes me the ways that God chooses to speak to me. Maybe it's my immature personality or the fact that I have a tendency to be very simple minded but I can't tell you how many times I have been watching Sponge Bob Squarepants and God opens my mind to some deep, or not so deep spiritual truth that is being portrayed right before my eyes. A few weeks ago, Oskar, the dog that we have had for over 6 years became very sick and past away, so now we have Hudson; a 13 week old Snouzer. Hudson is doing pretty well with potty training but sometimes he has accidents and as I sat at the computer doing some work the other day I began to smell one such accident. At first I thought maybe the dog had simply farted because he was setting on my lap at the time and has a tendency to do that when he's comfortable, this habit of his is somewhat annoying. I realized however, as I continued to smell that distinct smell that it's source was probably more than just a simple passing of some puppy gas. When I went to investigate, sure enough I found Hudson's little gift to me on the living room floor. After some time with the carpet cleaner, and some discipline for the dog I went back to work, but for some reason the smell did not go away. I thought maybe he had deposited some more goodies somewhere else in the house, but no matter how hard I looked I could not find anything else that would warrant the smell that was invading my nose. It was past time for me to be up at the church, so I abandoned my search and hopped in the car only to find that the smell was in the car as well! You may have suspected by now, as I did that if the smell had followed me from the house to the car that maybe I should stop looking for it's source in my surroundings and instead turn my eyes on my person. Sure enough, when I did this I found that somehow Hudson had left some of his goodness in a big glob right on my knee, did I mention I was wearing my new jeans? As gross as it may sound, instead of going inside to change my jeans, I just went on up to the church and did my best to wash the mess off. After scrubbing my jeans long enough for the goodness not to be visible any longer, I set to work in my office, however I quickly found out that even though there was no longer a visible mess on my knee, the smell was still very much hanging around.
As I thought about this incident, it became very clear to me how many times this happens to us in a spiritual sense. We realize that something somewhere stinks in our lives and so we do our best to get rid of it. We do good things, we try and be a good person, we recycle and yet no matter how hard we try, something still stinks. This even happens to us as Christians. We know we are forgiven, and we know that Christ is our Savior but at the same time the smell still lingers! Paul talks all through out the book of Colossians to a group of Christians about how they need to stop living the way they did before they came to Christ. As of coarse you know, the only way for me to stop smelling like poop on that fateful day was to get some clean jeans, and spiritually speaking The only way to be truly cleansed is to let go of who we were before, and to dive head first into who God wants us to be. I wonder how God will speak to you today if you are open, it just may be through an unexpected deposit on your new jeans.