I Am the Offering

The kids get so dirty after a day at school. I imagine they use the play yard like their own personal treasure island. They ravage their domain for every ounce of dirt they have time to dig up. It would explain the creases of grim inching down their necks and trailing up their scalp. The teachers giggle while they run about happy to see their imaginations at work. No one seems to care how dirty they get.

I cringe because I never wanted to get dirty as a child. My mother had to push me outside to play. Barbie’s were clean and reading was sanitary. Today, I still don’t enjoy getting dirty. When the girls were babies, they used my blouses as burp clothes. I grumbled every time.
When the kids reached elementary school and suffered some careless spill at lunch time, they knew I would have a complaint. “Girls should stay clean.”

But as I unveil myself from the vanities of this world, I see something different. I am dirtier today than I’ve been my whole life. I can’t scrub hard enough. I want to feel the squeaky clean that comes from a steaming hot shower and a luffer sponge. But the grim of sin has saturated the surface and is deep down in my bones.

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are
as filthy rags;” Isaiah 64:6

I take heart for one reason: My dirt is an offering–an opportunity for Christ to overtake me. When I climb up on the gleaming altar of holiness with all my dirt and muddy dispositions Christ turns me into His masterpiece. I become a gleaming vessel and a glowing light.

When I try to conjure ways to give God something in the way of thanks, it pales in comparison to this. The thanks that He desires is the dirty me willing to lay it all down. I want for us to understand that Christ wants all of us, and He knows that means more filth than fine goods.
Will you give Him all of you today? Won’t you stop trying to clean it up and give it up to the One who can straighten you up.

Share with me in the comments: Do you feel too dirty for God sometimes?

Tamika Eason is a passionate wife, writer, and awestruck mother to three daughters. She is amazed by God's great grace- that He chooses to love a woman so full of unworthiness. She and her husband serve in ministry in Austin, Texas.
You can find her writing inspirational fiction that showcases the power of supernatural love and blogging at The Potter's Wheel
http://www.tamikaeason.com/