Holy Fool

An Old Truck...

I found this old dump truck next to a park we visited on a recent trip to Mexico, Mo.

The body was rusty, and the interior dash had cracks from where the sun's heat had expanded and contracted the vinyl covering. The cargo area was full of refuse and cast-offs. The wheels were worn, and road tested. By all visible appearances this truck had seen it's best days pass into the rear-view mirror quite awhile ago. The truck needed a restoration, a renewal if it was going to return to full and useful function.

A song writer once said, "Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me."

Renewal of the heart...

Imagine someone ripping into your chest, with no anesthesia. They proceed to move past your breast plate, and separate your ribs. They take out your heart, and replace it with a new one.

Sounds extremely painful doesn't it?

What happens when we let God step in, and create in us a clean heart? What about the layers of sin that we have harbored, the un-confessed lies, the secret desires? There is pain in that, isn't there?

C.S. Lewis once wrote about a boy named Eustace. He was a very selfish boy who one day after waking from a nap in a cave found that he had been turned into a dragon. Looking in a calm lake he saw the being he had become, and began to dig into the scaly, iron-like flesh that now encased him. However, no matter how hard he dug he could not rid himself of the scales. A re-occurring lion character in this book named Aslan came along. He told Eustace to lie down, and he began to sink his sharp, long, powerful claws into the dragon scales. Eustace was in intense pain as Aslan cut away the layers of dragon scales. In the end Eustace returned to himself, a new creation. He had been stripped of the scales of his past and he was a profoundly changed person.

Renewal of heart sounds nice on the surface. However once we began to let God dig into our flesh with His holiness the painful reality of our true self comes to the surface. At this point our only choices are surrender to the process or walk away still carrying our wounds.

I want renewel.

I want pain. Not masochistic pain; but the glorious, transforming, life altering pain that comes with the commitment to seeing this Christ-filled-life to the end.