Pics of the Snow

We got a good bit of snow the night before last.  It was great, can’t wait for more!  I know my Florida friends will agree with me here.  Chicago and Boston people, maybe not so much.

Deep Cleaning

We’ve been cleaning up the house for holiday guests.  Once every few months we really deep clean the whole place- wipe the baseboards, vacuum the stairs, mop the floors (are you supposed to do this more often?) and sometimes we even dust the furniture.

Every time we do this I’m amazed at how clean everything looks.  The whole house seems brand new.

I’m also disgusted at how clean everything looks.  How dirty did the carpet/sink/pillowcases have to be originally for me to notice such a big difference after cleaning them?!

Oddly, nothing ever looks dirty before we clean it.  The dirt sets in so gradually you don’t even notice something’s amiss.  And often, even if something is particularly dirty, I get so used to how it looks that I learn to ignore the dirt.

A similar principle is at work in the way we understand sin in our lives.  Before Jesus purifies the Christian by standing in for us, there’s nothing to really compare our thoroughly sinful state with, so we aren’t very aware of just how depraved we are on a daily basis.  This is why I used to think thoughts like “I’m not all that bad” and “Surely there are worse sinners than me!” which now seem increasingly ludicrous to me.

Once the Holy Spirit begins the continual renewal of our inward selves, we start to see how very great our need for grace is.  The more we are renewed, the more we are able to see the depth of our faults, and the height of God’s unearned grace toward us.