Keep It Dirty

Michael Yaconelli, co-founder of the Christian Publishing Company, "Youth Specialties," wrote the following in his book, "Messy Spirituality."

For a period of time, we were lucky enough to have a housekeeper. She would come in once a week to dust, vacuum, and clean every little out-of-the-way corner of our house. I dreaded the day she came, because my wife and I would spend all morning cleaning the house for the housekeeper! We didn’t want the house to be dirty, or what would the housekeeper think?!

We act the same way with God. We talk our way out of the spiritual life by refusing to come to God as we are. Instead, we decide to wait until we are ready to come to God as we aren’t. We decide that the way we lived yesterday, last week, or last year makes us "damaged goods" and until we start "living right" we’re not "God material."

Some of us actually believe that until we choose the correct way to live, we aren’t choosable, that until we clean up the mess, Jesus won’t have anything to do with us. The opposite is true. Until we admit we’re a mess, Jesus won’t have anything to do with us. Once we admit how unlovely we are, how unattractive we are, how lost we are, Jesus shows up unexpectedly.

According to the New Testament, Jesus is attracted to the unattractive. He prefers the lost ones over the found ones, the losers over the winners, the broken instead of the whole, the messy instead of the unmessy, the crippled instead of the noncrippled.