Wednesday with mops, we scrub down the week weary and dusty from days.
“Look at mine!” Tall Girl holds up her cleaning rag, trophy of due diligence. She’s got grime lines on cotton.
“See mine? I got more.” Little Girl’s kneeling on floor next to sister, dangling her cloth, jubilant proof. Knowing your work really betters the world gratifies and I laugh delight, join her elation.
They’re washing away dust. Between spindles of creaking rockers, particles of time float in, lay a layer here where we live off gravel roads low to terra. Invite you to write your name before you too blow away, gone.
Atop a bookshelf of old beams, I do; write who I am in dust with grainy lines of a fingerprint on grain lines of wood. Then wipe away what I am. Someday I’ll return.
“What should we clean next?” Tall Girl finds me up high in the study, Little Girl with suds-dripping cloth gleefully jumping beside her.
Me.
Me made of dust with unclean lips, clean me. Clean me of lips dirty with anxiety and impatience, of complaint and worry. Clean me, one of the none who are righteous, one of the all who’ve turned aside, the none who does good, no not one, “their tongues slick as mudslides.” It’s not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of him, and this body of dust is dirty; clean me.
The girls take their elbow grease to rungs of paint worn chairs, spring cleaning the paths we wear down.
But what of this vaporous frame of dust?
A heart’s cleaned in the low bend of repentance, the creatures of dust repenting in dust, remembering what they are.
He, compassionate, never forgets.
Little Girl runs to the mudroom sink to rinse out, drench, her cloth again in lemon suds but I wear my dirt on fingertip. There’s a fount that flows from Emmanuel’s veins and “sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”
The fount’s at the Cross.
So this soul dusty from days, a soul wrapped in dust, makes her way to that Easter Tree by the way Jesus took: the way of eucharisteo, the drinking down all things with thanks.
That drink cleans the unclean lips.
O Lord, open my lips,That my mouth may declare Your praise. ~Ps. 51:15
Lord, in this season of Easter preparation I prepare for the Cross the way You did: eucharisteo. The giving up of lips soiled with self and embracing all of what You give with wild, wholesale gratitude.
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More: John and Noel Piper and a Month of Preparing for Easter
Lenten Lights: Devotions to Prepare for Easter by Nicole Piper
Consider preparing for Easter with giving up ingratitude and living thanksgiving
And our devotional Easter preparation
Photo: dust marks up high, bringing low
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