December 13th - little foxes

'It's the little things'  is something Keith and I used to say to each other when we were first married in reference to happenings, both good and bad, in our day to day lives which caused much bigger waves than one would expect.   Little gestures of kindness can really make someone's day.  Small words of encouragement can stick in someones mind for a lifetime.  Equally small thoughtless gestures, careless words, little oversights and meannesses can trash and ruin, spoil and damage way beyond their face value.

Over the past couple of days I have been aware of small annoyances buzzing round my head like flies.  On Tuesday I had a really busy but enjoyable day of Jo Jingles Christmas parties.  I arrived home exhausted to do the usual tea time routine, then went dashing out to housegroup.  My phone had died - which actually wasn't one of the annoyances - and when I got in from housegroup I found Keith had gone and bought me a new phone!  Which was really kind of him and made the end of a good day even better. 

But somehow, between setting up the new phone and going to sleep the annoyances started buzzing.   Someone said something in the wrong way and I took it to heart.  Which meant that when I sat down to write my Blog all the things I had wanted to say were then clouded by a seeping seething rash of anger which I tried, but failed, to ignore.  I started going over the thing in my head, which of course is never helpful , and before long the whole of my nice day seemed to be lying in tatters - all because of one unhelpful statement, which probably wasn't meant in the way that I heard it anyway.

Ridiculous isn't it?  We can overlook 1,000 great things that happen in a day and focus in on the one mistake, annoyance, difficulty, problem.

I think actually that we are like God in this respect.

I have always found it helpful to think of God as being like a sheet of perfectly white, pristine paper.
Unblemished and spotless.   He is perfect.   But of course the moment He comes near us He gets dirty.  Even one tiny weeny speck of dirt on His perfect clean sheet spoils Him.  He is no longer Holy.
So He cant come near us.  Because with the best will in the world, no matter how much bleach we use, we are never going to be able to get ourselves clean enough to be able to hug God without contaminating Him.

God sees the tiny, little, dark, horrible sinful imperfections and is every bit as able as we are to focus on them.  HOWEVER,  God doesn't do what I did, fixate and focus on the problem and make it bigger and bigger.  God looks at the problem and thinks '  Hmmmmm, now how can I get rid of that dark spot in Caz's soul and make her clean again so that I can hug her and both she and I can be holy and clean?'

And of course the answer is that Caz in herself cannot cover over, bleach out, remove or expunge the grot, but the blood of Jesus happens to be the perfect antidote.   ' The blood of Jesus' is a bit of a hefty religious statement which possibly doesn't mean much to many people these days.  What it means to me is that when Jesus died on the cross He was taking every annoyance and buzzing fly of anger and over-reaction, He was taking every hurtful, mean, bullying, unkind word anyone has ever spoken to me, every unhelpful or downright wicked act ever perpetrated against me, and wearing them like a coat.  He was beaten to a pulp and nailed to a piece of wood solely and only because He knew that I could not deal with these things myself.  But when He took all those millions of grievances and hurts and splinters into His own body He allowed me to be free of them all.  Every one.  Free of every sin I committed and every wound inflicted by others.   So now I can stand completely clean before God the Father and get close enough to Him to feel His breath on my face and be at one with His pure, blinding ,blazing white holiness.

Awesome eh?

So next time the flies of annoyance and irritation are buzzing round your head, picture the flies buzzing round Jesus as He hung in the mid-day middle eastern sun and be thankful that because of Him no dirt will stick to you.