This is the sight that greeted me as I walked into the bathroom to get ready for bed tonight. I turned to my husband and said, “That girl,” our daughter, “just can’t help but leave a mess behind her can she? I’m going to start calling her Pig pen!” And I was only half joking. Yet part of me smiled as I looked at her clothes shed for her nighttime bath. Someday there won’t be a little blonde-haired girl running through the house half-naked and dripping a trail through the living room and giggling as she goes. Someday our house won’t be the loud chaotic mess it is now. It will be quiet and things will stay where I put them. Some days that thought thrills me… others not so much.
Someday I’ll walk through this house and it will be clean, no traces of sticky finger prints on the windows or door knobs. There won’t be any dirty socks stuck between the couch cushions or any toy trucks to stub my toe when the lights go out. My house will be quiet and clean… maybe a little too clean if you ask me. For years I fought the mess with everything I had in me. Some days I still do, but not usually.
Yes, tonight as I brushed my teeth I smiled at the mess and, of all things, thought of Thomas’s famous statement of doubt. “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.” (John 20:25) Thomas wanted to see the scars, the mess left behind from the cross. He wanted the proof that it had really happened, that Jesus had really been there at the cross and come back. And he wasn’t disappointed either. Eight days later, Jesus came to him in a locked room and told Thomas to touch His scars and believe. Jesus kept His scars from the cross, He’s God, He could have easily erased them from His resurrected body but He chose to keep them. Why? Because they are the proof, the only proof, that He truly hung on the cross and died. They are proof that He came and conquered Death itself. They are proof that He has overcome the trials, troubles and tribulations of this world and won. Which means that we can too.
Paul tells us in 2nd Corinthians chapter 4 verses 16 through 18, “do not lose heart. Though our outerself is wasting away our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Whatever you’re going through today, a messy house or cancer treatments, it won’t last forever.
Tamar Knochel 