dust to dust... more lessons from household chores

Our venetian blinds have been crying out for a dust for some time... nine months to be precise. My memories of venetian cleaning are less than fond - think "fighting with thin slivers of metal" and you get the idea. I always ended up worse off, thus I avoid cleaning venetians like the plague.

However our blinds were getting beyond a joke, and once I started this morning, it really wasn't so painful. (It did help that they were wooden venetians with half as many slats, and I had a snazzy dusting cloth that seemed to suck the dust into its weave!)

What amazed me was not that the blinds were dusty, but just how dusty they were! Once I started wiping the layers of grime away, revealing the lovely tone of the wood, the rest of the slats looked awful.

Over time the dust had fallen, I gradually noticed it and eventually wiped it away. It was only once I started cleaning that I could see how bad things really were.

I got to thinking that life's like that. Well mine is anyway! Without care, over time I develop bad attitudes and my character falls into disrepute. It happens gradually and I don't really notice the slide - until I meet an extremely kind person, or something dramatic happens that reveals the worst in me. Suddenly my state of inner ugliness is seen for what it is, and I have to do something to clean things up.

I've been having an inner dirt revealing day... or maybe that's an inner dirt revealing month! There's so much crud inside of me. Not nice.

This is terribly cliched, but very true - the best soul duster I know is Jesus. If I couldn't ask him to come and clean me up I'd be sunk! Thankfully he never gets tired of wiping my inner soiling away and then I go on, working more closely with him to stay clean on the inside.