A thin layer of dust

I spent Saturday cleaning my church. Vacuuming and straightening, things like that. Generally, when I do this I only hit the main spots. High traffic areas where little grass bits or small things show up and look untidy. Yes, I used the word untidy. :)

This time though, I decided I was going to vacuum the entire place because dust doesn't only settle on high traffic areas. Just because you can't see the thin layer of dust doesn't mean it's not there.
When I left the church felt cleaner to me. It was just a feeling though. It really wasn't visible. If anyone had looked at it, they wouldn't have known it had taken an extra x of time because I hit those spots. No one will probably ever know.

I've got those low traffic areas in my life. Dust settles on them, but with the background of my life you don't really see the dirt. You see my words are clean, my actions are clean, the big visible things I do all day long, maybe those are clean. But there are small areas of my life that just aren't cleaned on regularly. But God can see the dirt regardless of the background.

It's not about being unsaved. It's not about being a bad person. It's about having every single little tiny teensy weensy portion of your entire 24/7/365/366 life under Gods cleansing grace. It's about being holy. Righteous. And it's simply amazing.

I know in my life I go easy on myself. "You can't expect to be perfect 24 hours a day, come on". What? wait... Shouldn't I expect myself to be perfect 24 hours a day? Every moment, every word, every thought every action. Shouldn't I expect that? "But nobody is perfect". So what? Maybe I'll be the second most perfect. Isn't it better to aim for that goal and miss than to aim for 'so/so' and wind up so/so. Doesn't God expect that to be my aim?

It's the holiness difference.

Holiness calls things cancerous that I would call benign. Think about that. If you have a cancerous tumor, you cut the tumor out, you cut out the area around the tumor, you check anything that the cancer cells could have spread to, and then after doing all that you undergo very serious and difficult treatments to make sure the cancerous cells are dead and gone. Then you check back every so often to make certain that it hasn't snuck back in on you. If you have a benign tumor, you cut it out and move on. Think about that. Holiness calls things cancerous that I would call benign.

Here's the best news though. Holiness has the clean edge of perfection. And holiness seems to be most evident when you keep those low traffic areas as clean as the high traffic. It may not show, but it feels. My church didn't look cleaner, but it felt cleaner. And I can't think of anything more exciting than living a life that's felt more than it's seen.