Clean

 Once again on my hands and knees, scrubbing the dirt from the cracks and the seams. I thought that the floor was clean when I mopped, but then I noticed the flecks and I stopped. I grabbed a sponge and got down on all fours, and there it was around all the mop boards as if little tractors had deposited their grime when they marched through the house in double time!

I groaned and I fretted until the mopping was done and determined that before the day’s setting sun, I would take the time to clean it all out and make the floor shine. It would be clean, no doubt! Little did I know what lie in store, and the lesson I would learn from a simple floor. My heart must have been right for the teacher appeared, the message delivered, my conscience cleared.

I started in the easiest spot that I found by the bedroom carpet, there I put my knees down. With my nose as close to the floor as I could, I noticed the tracks across the edge of the wood. Like flecks of tar that came in from the street, they stuck to the floor, and I sprayed on a sheet of chemical to loosen them so I could scrub and then took a rag and began to rub.

It didn’t come loose unless I pushed with my hands, my fingertips ached, my muscles like bands, my shoulders hunched forward, hard to the task, my back sinews taut as time marched on past. I moved down the hall to the dining room, under the table, each crack I did groom. The sweat poured like rain from my brow up above, so I wiped with my sleeve and wished for a glove.

Then somewhere, somehow, in my simple mind’s eye, the sweat became blood where my Savior did cry. He, too, was down on his hands and his knees, the sweat there did pour, his muscles pain seized. He was determined to stay strong to the end, to finish the work, God’s will not to bend. He prayed and he bled from every pore, when he thought that he could not take any more.

For a moment I watched him, my heart opened wide, wanting to hold him, aching inside. I felt as if I was there in the flesh, his spirit and mine were one, enmeshed. Tears fell down my face as I prayed silently. “Thy will be done,” he said quietly. Only then did my eyes see again the floor and the task that I faced was no longer a bore.

What he did there that day for you and for me, we will never know, we will never see. All that we know is that when he was done, we were no longer ours past the setting sun. We were bought with a price that he paid then and there, no matter what we’ve done, whether or not we do care. He simply says “Come, follow me,” I will take you there, then set you free.

By the time I was finished, I knew in my heart, that a clean floor may be important, if I do my part, but there is something that I cannot do for myself that he did for me, not just a book on a shelf. He gave me a chance to be clean through and through, much past the surface, my heart and soul, too. He paid the price that I might live. His blood washed me clean. His praises I give!