As a student, I moved into a newly constructed hostel. The design of the hostel was good except for one tiny detail. They had forgotten all about the line for drying clothes. They quickly made an arrangement. They tied lines on each floor of the hostel in one specific place, aligning all the lines one below the other (just like in this picture). The hostellers quickly used the laundry facility and washed their colorful bedsheets, bright red kurtas, and pure white shirts and dried them in the cloth line of their respective floors. The very next day I could hear the moan of a lot of them. Already dried clothes of someone on the ground floor got wet again when a girl from the first floor decided to dry some wet clothes without draining the excess water. The pure white shirt of another girl had turned pale red because the water from the bright red kurta dried above her line. There were missing clothes and clothes pushed to a corner because someone else wanted to use the same line. What havoc!
The very first thing that came to my mind after seeing the mess, was the body of Christ. I could draw so many analogies! I could philosophically wander with all the similarities and the implications that I could infer. Here are a few of them.
For some reason, the church of God these days with the inbuilt hierarchies could be very much compared to drying clothes in a multi-storey building. Every one of us dirty our lives. And we need to wash and dry our acts. Sometimes, the consequence of our actions causes inconvenience for someone else. This is especially true when the one at fault is on the higher floors, I mean in a higher post. But where do you think the person on the higher floor should dry their clothes? If the people on the lower floors grumble, the only other option available is to leave the clothes dirty. Sometimes that is what pastors, mentors, teachers, or preachers are forced to do. Any cleaning up of acts is treated with so much disgust that they chose to remain dirty. Of course, some are just lazy or are just not bothered to wash.
When someone else’s sin stains or water wets our clean or drying clothes, are we patient enough to bear with them? When our drying gets delayed because someone on top was lazy to drain the excess water, would we bear with them? When someone else uses up our clothes drying line or opportunities, would we bear with them? Would we be considerate of those below us when we do our own washing? We all do things that we think are right. Some of them end up right and some wrong.
This blog is where I scribble my convictions and perceptions. I do it with prayer. However, there are chances that I miss the mark. When the Spirit convicts me, I will repent and correct my convictions. Yet, in the meanwhile, there are possibilities of my mistake seeping through and hurting those whom I influence. So, when you read from this site, bear with me and remember, this is where I possibly dry my clothes too!
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