Warning: Graphic imagery used in below post.

Meditations from a bathroom sink

I've been recovering from a cold for this entire week. In general, when you want to get rid of an illness, you want to a) stay bundled up and make sure your immune system has all the water and nutrients to do its job, and b) help your body get the pathogens out as quickly as possible. While I've been keeping my head covered while sleeping and gulping down gallons of water each day, I've also been doing my best to speed part B along as quickly as possible.

This morning as I got ready for work, I found myself leaning over the bathroom sink with sickly yellow mucous flowing out of my nose and hocking up a disgusting gray pus from my throat. As the glop oozed its way down the sink, I could feel my stomach turn in disgust at the sight of the conglomeration of bacteria, dead cells, and other nasty stuff that had so recently been residing in my sinuses or my throat. I couldn't conceive of a more despicably disgusting substance.

Did you feel yourself involuntarily recoiling at the word picture the above paragraph was portraying?

I think this is an example of the way God reacts to sin. Sure, Scripture may tell us that God hates sin, and that it is something cognitively antithetical to the character of God - but I think it's usually hard to get some kind of understanding of how He really feels about it. I think that sin is something that inspires an involuntary shiver of disgust in God's shoulders. He would see people steeped in sin the way that we would see someone covered in pus and snot - recoiling in revulsion. Sin is a disgusting thing.

And yet... I hear that in marriages, the real epiphany moment of love for a spouse is after the euphoria of the wedding or the honeymoon, when you realize that you will be living with another human being for the rest of your life, even during those times when they are not at their best. The epiphany moment when caring for your baby is when you're cleaning up urine and watery crap, getting it thoroughly on you. Cleaning up the disgusting things is a sign of love.

In a similar way, despite the revulsion that God must feel when He sees the sin in His people, He still lovingly picks us up and cleans off the crap. Jesus took the illness of sin from all people into His own perfect life and conquered it with His death and resurrection. One day, we will be totally cleansed of the sin that infects us, free from the crud that infects us down to the depth of our soul.

Love is an amazing thing.