Faith Forward
~Are You a Sponge?

Posted by Julie DeVisser on August 16th, 2010 in Blog | 9 Comments

As I was washing my dishes the other night, I started contemplating the use of the sponge I was holding. If you know me at all, you know that while I am doing daily {or more likely weekly} tasks such as this, I don’t typically contemplate the deeper meanings that could be associated with these activities.

Picture it… a Thursday night with about a week’s {or more} worth of dishes to do. Not to mention a week’s {or more} worth of build-up and grime on said dishes. They needed some work. Strong hands, and some good scrubbing, to really take care of this job. I set to work with my handy dishrag, but found that I needed something a little stronger to take off some of the areas that were a little (or a lot) more stuck.

I opened up a brand new package of sponges and set out to take care of these problem areas and began thinking about how we all are like sponges.

Sponges have a soft side, just like the side of us that shows compassion to those we care about when they are hurting or maybe when they just need a hug. You can see this in a parent making their young child feel better when they’ve scraped their knee on the playground or a grown child holding the hand of a dying parent.

We also have an abrasive side. The side of us that tries to take the grime off other people when things don’t go the way we want or need to… or when we need to fight for something we believe in.

But then there is the core of the sponge, the part of us that picks up “things” (habits, traits, words are all examples) from the people we surround ourselves with, the television or movies that we watch, the music we listen to and the places we visit. While sometimes we fill our lives with the clean “soapy” things of life… somehow the “dirty waters” can make their way in and fill our hearts with doubt and our heads with things that aren’t true.

And when the “dirty waters” are soaked in, we need to be “cleaned” to have the dirty waters squeezed out of us. We need to find our way back to the things in life – the clean waters – that our creator has meant for us to see, to live for… and to create adventure in.

Life isn’t about soaking in and thinking about the wrong in what we do or think about… but rather, finding what might need to be changed, and soaking in the clean waters.

Do you need to change the “waters” you are soaking in?