Friends and Family,
Yesterday, I taped a group of high schoolers from an Indiana Free Church “mucking houses.” I am not sure if that’s a technical term or not, but it is the term used around here to describe the process of cleansing out all the mud, mold, and rotting furniture that is overflowing from so many of the flooded homes in New Orleans.
When a team arrives at a house, there are often 3 or 4 feet of muck on the floor, patio, and sometimes even roof. And then over the course of one or two days, the team goes through the whole home, strips out everything from the mud on the floor to the mold-infested drywall, and dumps it onto the front lawn for a garbage truck to come and haul away.
The hope is then that with only the bricks and frame of the home remaining, that new drywall, carpet, etc. will be added to the existing frame and the house will be restored to its true form.
Yesterday, the team from Indiana was mucking the home of Kathy, a boisterous lady in her mid-forties. For someone who had lost so much, she was in surprisingly good spirits. She was constantly cracking jokes with the team, thanking them profusely for their help and friendship, and often saying with a shrug, “All of this is just material stuff. I’m just glad I still have my family.”
As I watched Kathy’s home slowly transform from a city dump in a box into the simple frame of the home it once was, I couldn’t help but think that this must bring her a lot of healing. To go through the pile of rubble on her front lawn and pick out the few items she sees worth keeping…to see her home return to a state that at least looks like it’s in a process of rebuilding rather than a process of rotting…to make even a few strides toward normalcy, when her whole neighborhood looks like a deserted warzone…
As one team member put it while clearing muck out of the backyard, “It must bring her a little bit of hope to see her patio again.”
As I watched Kathy’s home cleansed from the inside out, I was struck by how closely this mirrored my own spiritual journey. I so easily tend toward selfish and perverse thoughts and actions, and thus essentially allow Katrina to come in and fill me with muck all the time. But the Bible speaks of God’s healing grace and power to come in and wash me out. To bring forgiveness, dump all of my sin and baggage out onto the front lawn, and haul it out of sight to the city dump…leaving me cleansed, renewed, forgiven, free of everything that had been rotting inside of me, and ready to be rebuilt into the true person God made me to be.
When Christ died on the cross, that was his intention. Through his death and resurrection, he desired to cleanse us and restore us…and to restore his relationship with us.
It was striking to me that for no charge, EFCA Compassion Ministries will come and muck anyone’s home who asks – no matter what their economic standing, religious association, race, gender…anything. All they need to do is see their need for help and ask for it. And yet, so many people haven’t asked.
Have you asked Christ to de-muck your life?
-Dave
