Cleanliness

When traveling with various carnivals back in the late 80s, getting and staying clean – hygiene – was a daily chore.  The game trailers have sleeping quarters built into the back, and if you’re lucky, some have toilets in them.  But showers?  Not likely!  Every day I either showered in makeshift shower areas on the carnival lot or did the best bathing I could in gas station or restaurant bathrooms (I remember an awkward time when I was washing my hair in a McDonalds bathroom and a worker came in and started talking.  I couldn’t understand her, and I felt obvious and weird enough, so I just would say things like ‘Haha, yeah,’ etc.  Then I discovered she was talking to someone else on her headset…..).  When we’d had an especially lucrative night of pay, we’d spring for a motel room…that was the best!  Until you have to make the effort to be clean, you tend to take the convenience of readily available showers and bathtubs for granted!  My sister, a missionary to North Africa, made a similar observation regarding the ease with which most of us Americans can access water.
 
I recently was remembering back to the ‘bathe in a restaurant bathroom’ days, and my scrambling to always find ways to stay clean, physically.  My mind turned to thoughts of being spiritually clean…prayerfully asking God to remove sin in my life, bad thoughts, harbored resentments…fasting…applying Truths I discover during Bible study…staying in fellowship with other believers.  I am ashamed to say that I’m not quite as diligent in getting spiritually clean, not as obsessed with finding ways to spiritually cleanse the filth of the world off of me.  There are days I pray as more of an afterthought than a meaningful conversation, and evenings I fall asleep realizing I didn’t study the Word that day.  May I ‘feel’ the grime of sin like I used to feel and seek to remove the grime of the midway.  Amen.

“Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.” ~Psalm 51:2