“Do you have
something in the oven?” My wife asked me
one Saturday morning.
“Yes”.
“What are
you making” She had that expectant half smile, thinking that I was maybe making
something good for breakfast.“Dirt.” The half smile disappeared and was replaced by a half quizzical, half unsurprised (because it was, after all, me) look.
“Dirt?”
“Well…mud, really. But I’m hoping it will turn into dirt.”
“By now,” she said, “I should know better than to ask; but… why?”
The reason
was that I needed dirt for an illustration for a sermon I was giving the next
morning. We had just started preaching a
series on growing through adversity; growing through being sifted, in other words.
So in this illustration I was to take some dirt (very useless dirt that won’t
grow anything – which my yard is full of), put a handful of larger rocks in it,
then sift it through one of my mesh strainers from the kitchen. And lastly, go by a new mesh strainer. After the sifting there would be two
piles: A pile of useless dirt in which
nothing could grow, and a pile of rocks.
I would point out that which pile we land in depends on our response to
the seasons of sifting in our lives. I
would point out the uselessness of the dirt and go on about that for a bit;
then I would point out the significance of a rock. That people used to build alters out of
rocks, that David brought down Goliath with a rock, that Simon was given the
name Peter (Petra) which means rock, that Christ describes faith as a rock on
which he will build his church, etc. etc.
I would then present the audience with a choice: Do you want to be dirt, or do you want to be
a rock. It is completely up to us.
Unfortunately it had been raining all night. Although the illustration was for the benefit
of the audience, I was learning a lesson by getting it ready. The Holy Spirit had given me the idea for the
illustration late in the week before. But
I didn’t act on it. I wasn’t sure I
wanted to do it (yeah, yeah - I know). There had been plenty of sunny days
between then and now, and I knew it was likely to rain over the weekend. When it started raining Friday night I thought,
“Ehh, don’t really need the illustration anyways” (yeah, yeah - I know). Of
course when I woke up Saturday morning the Holy Spirit burdened my heart with
the illustration to the point that I couldn’t relax with my coffee until I had
gone outside and gathered enough dirt.
Except there
wasn’t any dirt. There was only
mud. So I thought about how mud becomes
dirt: by being baked in the sun’s heat. Well
I couldn’t simulate the sun, but I could simulate the heat.
“Won’t that
just make it a brick?” asked my
wife. I hadn’t thought about that. Surely there was more to making bricks than
just baking simple mud. Right? Maybe, just to be safe, if I slow baked it,
instead of trying to dry it too fast, it would keep it from hardening into a
brick. So I set the oven to 200
degrees. About twelve hours later I pull
it out of the oven. It had dried! Into a
brick. So know I had to find something
(I ended up using a screw driver) to break it into chunks, and then grind the
chunks back into dirt with my hands. In the end it was a time consuming, messy
process that could have been avoided had I just done what I was supposed to do
in the first place. So the lesson here
is this: things – life in general – are easier when we do things God’s way the
first time.
