Mud pies

Summer is great because we can play outside. The pool, bike rides, evening runs, washing the car, playing in the sandbox...and playing in the mud. This week El asked me if her and Ems could play in the mud. Why not? I told her as long as she was ok with being hosed down before we went into the house to shower, they could get as dirty as they wanted. So I put on their old T-Shirts and panties and we headed out to play with MUD. Ohhhh the satisfaction in their faces as they were hard at work carving trails, making "piles," and covering their appendages with the goopy, sloppy stuff! I sat watching for awhile, but then something came across my mind as I watched them do this. So of course I grabbed my camera!

Playing in the mud as children is truly innocent. Yes it gets them dirty and gets under their fingernails. Yes it's kind of gross and absolutley an unclean and unsanitary activity! Yes sometimes what one of them was doing in the mud affected the other because it splattered. And even one time I caught El rubbing it all over Ems. Pure joy and totally innocent, right?!


Well I was thinking how playing in the mud is just like our adult life and how we want to pursue and play in the mud, many times this being totally offensive to God. Yes it's gross and unclean to be judgmental and materialistic, but we are. Yes our bad choices and sin are dirty, but we still find ourselves being greedy and impatient, rubbing the mud into our hands/feet even more. And worse yet, just like my sweet innocent El who was trying to "help" her sister get dirty, we rub our mud onto other people a lot of the time. We pull people down with our anger and bitterness. Or by our short and curt reactions to someone when they don't do what we want them to do. We roll our eyes and degrade people, we think we're better than them...and we rub the mud from our hands to theirs...it affects them as well.


Sometimes we're even PROUD of the dirt and mud on us. We look at the mud as reputation building and successful, rather than what it really is; world-loving and distracted hearts and minds from what our true love should be. We shouldn't be proud of our dirty hands and feet.


The ironic thing about this afternoon activity with my girls is that even though I warned them about having to be hosed down before we went into the house, they HATED the process. The water was too cold...or it "hurt" their toes...or it wasn't coming out fast enough...or they wanted to hold the hose and squirt each other.

Man isn't that true of the process of being cleansed by God? Even though we know we need to be cleaned up, it's certainly not a comfortable process. It's awkward, it might hurt a little bit, AND it sure is easier to want to hold the hose and squirt someone else's dirty feet off than to have our own done. But the end result? The point? We become more focused and godly men and women. We can see more clearly when we go to JESUS and have the mud taken off our eyes. And it's right.

A day after making mud pies, after being hosed down and showering, my girls still had mud under their fingernails. And that's TOTALLY normal...those are the "hard to reach spots," right? Ultimately, the only way for me to get that dirt out was to cut their nails, and I did! Cut the mud out. Throw the clippings away. Of course you can see the parallel...sometimes that's what we need to do with things in our lives that are causing us to carry around mud in the "hard to reach spots."

Here's a quote that also came to my mind as I was watching this afternoon activity the other day. Problem...we look for fulfillment in all the wrong places. Just like making mud pies and calling that "fun" (because it IS for a 4 yr old and 20 mo old) rather than really experiencing life. My kids have no idea what all is out there for them to experience. Sadly, we find satisfaction in areas we shouldn't as well. And then when that satisfaction takes us in the wrong direction, we stay covered in mud rather than go to the hose.

C. S. Lews

"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”