Phew! What Stinks?

Zechariah 13
9 And I will bring the third part through the fire, And will refine them as silver is refined, And will try them as gold is tried: They shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: And they shall say, The Lord is my God.

I opened my fridge yesterday and a horrible smell came out of it. I thought, “What in the world is that smell”, I looked to see if I could see anything rotten that would be causing that smell. I did not find anything. So I dismissed it. My husband opened up the fridge and found the same smell and tried to find out what it was….and could not. Well, I was determined to figure it out, so I started moving things, picking up things, smelling things and I found the culprit. It was a package of feta cheese that had expired. Boy did it stink. A few hours later, we opened the fridge again and well, it still smelled. So we put some baking soda in there to soak up the stench. This morning, I again opened up the fridge and there was that same smell that we had yesterday, except worse. I am thinking now what in the world could it be. Then a light bulb came on (no not the fridge light), I remembered that I had salmon a couple days ago and I bet that some juice from the package slipped out. I immediately took out the disinfectant and cleaned the area. Yep, you guessed it, no more smell.

You know we have a lot of things in our lives that stink. Things that God does not like to see or smell. I think that He is constantly giving us signs of things that He wants us to clean up. I know in my life I have a lot of things that need cleaning. He puts things in my head that I did years and years ago. When they pop up, I ask God to forgive me and He does. He cleans me up. His plan is to make us pure. To refine us, to disinfect us in order to be a part of His church, His body. Do you find that things pop up in your mind? Things that happened forever ago? Realize that when those things pop up, and they will, that God is cleaning you up. He loves you. Ask for His forgiveness. He will. Once you go through this cleaning process, your light bulb will go off as well. You will become to realize how wonderful and loving our God is. We need to simply obey.

Dear Lord, I ask that you continue to refine me. Clean me up. All I want is to be your humble servant. Please show me what I need to throw away in order to become closer to you. You are our mighty Creator and you are the one in control of ALL things and I thank you so much that you love us so much to continue to clean us up and that you have the patience to not give up on us. In your mighty name, Amen.