filthy rags...

Warning: If female topics give you the heebies…leave the blogging room & find something else to do for the next few minutes.

I have often said that I rank plugs [tampons] as one of man’s finest inventions of all time. [Save the debate for someone who has never strapped a pad the size of a catalog in their underwear.] I have blessed God out loud over the years for placing my feet along the timeline of eternity at a time of indoor plumbing and Super Plus tampons. I remember the moment my mother explained the whole nine yards of the most humiliating contraption I have seen to this day to my 13-year-old horrified self. Bless her heart- I think she equated tampons with sexual activity at the time and we simply were not going there. I still remember “coming out” and telling my mom I had made the switch. Glory to God and Praise Jesus. What I wouldn’t give to reclaim those horrific Junior High years. My Aunt Liz always used to say how romantic it would have been to have lived at a time when ladies wore those beautiful bonnets and floated around wearing one of those bellowing hoopskirts surrounded by tons of fabric, all corseted together in one fine swoop. Right. Think about it…

“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.”~ Isaiah 64:6

Imagine my reaction last night when Jerry told us that “filthy rags” refers to, well you know. I looked it up myself. On my best of days, the ones where I actually say something, think something, do something I think might in the smallest of ways look a bit like Jesus…filthy rags. All of them. And the picture in my mind wasn’t of a small but amazingly absorbent little bullet of cotton fibers; the picture in my mind was the one my mother painted for me when I complained about having to conceal a pillow in my jeans every month. She would remind me of how lucky I was…that when she was my age they had to make strips of old sheets and layer them together, and pin them neatly to their panties. And she would remind me of how they would have to wash them out by hand in a crock to reuse them over and over again. Filthy rags. Unclean. Ooey.

Not a pretty picture is it? Especially when the best thing I’ll ever do in my entire life, whatever God decides that might be, is still a mess of dirty linen without His righteousness and His goodness attributed to me.

“Yet, O LORD, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O LORD; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look upon us, we pray, for we are all your people.” ~Isaiah 64:8,9

"Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” ~Isaiah 1:18

“It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” ~I Corinthians 1:30

I still think plugs are the best thing since sliced bread. But they’ll never come close to #1 on my list of things I can’t live without: Grace. Glory to God and Praise Jesus.

Men. It’s safe to come into the room now…