Ewww...That Stinks

Our pet rabbit, Flower, has a cage in our laundry room. Monday morning, I went in the laundry room to start sorting and washing clothes, but the smell of the cage was overwhelming. I realized one of my daughters had neglected her responsibility to clean out the cage on Saturday. I left the baskets of dirty clothes and called the negligent daughter to come take care of her job.

I left…she cleaned…I returned. The smell was still pretty bad. I looked at the cage. Although we lined the wire mesh cage with pieces of cardboard, the mesh allows poo pieces to fall through to the newspaper-covered floor beneath. The cardboard was now clean and fresh, but the poo still covered the newspaper. Again, I called the daughter to return and finish the job.

I left…she cleaned…I returned. Wow, the smell just didn’t seem to be getting any better. As I sorted laundry, I noticed the trash can. It contained all the trash the girls had removed from the cage and some wipes they had used to wipe up the floor. Although Flower’s cage was clean as was the floor beneath it, the source of the stink still remained. Again, I called my daughter to return, this time to take out the trash.

You’re probably thinking this is gross and wondering why I’m sharing it with the world. I’m sharing it because the stench and mess of the poo reminded me of the stench and mess of sin in our lives. Natural, yet messy, things get into our lives and cause a stink. The presence of sin doesn’t indicate a loss of our salvation; we all continue to sin even though we wish we wouldn’t. We can’t let them build-up though. Every so often, even as Christians, we have to go in and clean out the cage. Make apologies, seek forgiveness, deny behaviors, do the right thing…whatever it is, God is calling us to do it.

This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God (Matthew 5:23-24 MSG).

Not only do we have to clean out the messes sometimes, but it may take a few tries to get it right. Let me be clear here – God forgives sin the first time we confess it to Him. However, it may take a few tries to get rid of the reoccurrence in our lives.

We sin…God forgives…We return. Even though He has forgiven our sin, sometimes we still mess up and do it again. God’s response is to call us back to Him once again and forgive us once again. 

We sin…God forgives…We return. Hopefully we can break the cycle at some point. Unfortunately, we may be in heaven before that occurs. Thankfully, His grace will last that long.

Growing Barefoot is Painful

Two foot stories – two lessons learned. Coincidental? Not for a girl who runs “Grow Barefoot."

First Foot

About two months ago, I became aware a friend was suffering from a severe infection in her toe. The pain was so bad it kept her from being able to walk much. She reluctantly began a round of antibiotics, and I assumed she had taken care of the problem. A few days ago, I found out it hadn’t healed; in fact, it had grown much worse. She told me something regarding her ordeal that has stayed with me. She said, “It is so frustrating that such a small part of my body can be so bothersome!”



I’m working on a lesson about problems within the body of Christ for my next Bible study book. So, when I heard her reference to the body, my mind immediately thought of 1 Corinthians 12:12-26, “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. … If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (I have posted only the first and last verse here; to read the entire passage, hover your cursor over the reference and it will pop up.) Sometimes an infection gets into a group of believers and causes pain similar to the burdensome pain of my friend’s experience. To say that an “infection” permeates a group of believers may make you think of so-and-so who did such-and-such that caused so much pain in our church. However, when I say “infection,” please know that people are not infections. The infections that get into our churches are pride, hypocrisy, selfishness, and the rest of our sinful devices. Those things grow and spread throughout the body, causing pain wherever they go.

Second Foot

On the same day I found out my friend’s toe problem hadn’t yet healed, my daughter hobbled around saying her foot hurt. She’s been suffering from growing pains in her legs and joints lately. I attributed her pain to that, offered her some children’s pain reliever, and told her it would get better. An hour later, she was still crying. My husband looked at her foot and found, upon close examination, that a little, barely visible splinter was in the arch of her foot. Through much pinching, poking, and tweezing on our part and many screams and wails on her part, we finally extracted the foreign object. What looked like a mere speck on the outside was long and went deep into her foot. You know me, I immediately thought, “There’s a lesson here.”



The lesson isn’t that you shouldn’t walk outside barefoot because I am a big proponent of that myself.

The lesson is that problems may appear small and inconsequential on the surface but as you start working them out, you realize how deep they go. Again, I think it is the same way in our churches. We tend to ignore a problem; we think it’s really no big deal. Maybe we even offer some generic pain reliever like I did to my daughter but it doesn’t help the situation. However, we may not realize how deep the problem goes and how much pain it’s causing. We have to work out the splinters, even if it causes some screaming and wailing in the process. Only when we removed the splinter was my daughter free to run and jump and do all the things kids love to do without any pain. Just like people aren’t infections, people aren’t splinters. At their most basic level, “splinters” look very much like “infections.” They are all the problems caused when we let our sinful side control us rather than the Spirit of God. When the Spirit controls us, then we also can run, jump, and be spiritually free just like my daughter was able to do once her pain was gone.

Always Be Ready to Quit

Grow Barefoot is happy to welcome guest blogger Jennifer Slattery.  It's interesting to read her article and see God teaching her some of the same stuff He's been teaching me the past couple of months.  "Let go of the stress and trust Me..."

Sometimes I think my laundry basket has the whole Elijah thing going on—like with the widow who never ran out of flour. Most days my home runs like a fast-paced assembly line. Wake up, make the bed, clean the kitchen, answer the phone, take my daughter to school, fold laundry, mop the floor, pick my daughter up from school, go to bed, wake up, make the bed… It’s like a never-ending cycle that drags me from one task to the next like a wayward waif clinging to a steadily moving conveyer belt. And each day before I pull myself out of bed, I make a promise—to myself and to God. Today I will find time to pray.

But then the day begins, and laundry must be folded, lunches must be made, and dishes must be washed.

But what would happen if I quit…for a day? What if I put my to-do list aside, turned off my cell phone, unplugged my land line, and shut down my computer? What if I set everything aside to rest and be refreshed by God’s presence? Perhaps my house would not be as tidy as I would like, and maybe left-overs would grace our table more frequently, but along with the dirty dishes and micro-waved meals, my family would get a much happier, calmer me. And I suspect, if I were to ask them which they preferred--an immaculate home and crabby mommy or a little bit of clutter with much joy--I am sure they would choose the latter.

Jennifer Slattery lives in the Midwest with her husband of sixteen years and their fourteen year old daughter. She writes for Christ to the World Ministries, The Christian Pulse, the Internet Café Devotions, Jewels of Encouragement, and co-hosts (with five other authors) a Facebook faith community called Living by Grace. Find out more about her and her writing at http://jenniferslatterylivesoutloud.com/.