A Flood of Thoughts

Last week during all the heavy rains in our area, our basement flooded. My Barnabas friends (a group of writers formed to encourage each other) tried to encourage me by saying, "You'll get through this. You're a writer and you'll even find lots of things to write about from this." At the time it seemed a little crazy. But they were right. There were a lot of analogies to be drawn from the experience.

As my husband and I used squeegies to push the sludge back into the sewers (they had gushed raw sewage into our fininished basement), I thought about how God cleans lives. He can, in an instant, clean all the filth that sin has deposited in our lives. Our cleanup took much longer and was not nearly as efficient.

Remembering the chaos that ensued when I realized the basement was filling with dirty water, I thought about how I frantically went through each room looking for what seemed most precious and setting it on higher ground. Later, as we went through boxes that were soggy, I pulled out a couple of old flower containers. They were not sentimental nor were they expensive but I was beginning to fight back. I wanted to hold on to some of those things--not throw them on the heap that was growing at the curb.

How often do we hold on to things that keep us from God--unimportant things--when He is trying to clean our lives of what keeps us from Him.

Then there were the goldfish. If they had stayed hidden in the rocks in the pond instead of swimming into the flow of the water that was receding, they would not have been left on the grass to die. Too often we go with the flow instead of standing with Christ, our rock.

Yes, my friends, there was much to think and write about.