Dirty Cars

If anyone knows anything about me, they I know that I like to keep my vehicle pretty clean. No piles of trash or papers in the seats, smelly old food on the floor, or clutter on the dashboard for me!

Tonight as I was talking to my friend Chad Nichols, he related how he recently cleaned out Asher (his Audi) – vacuuming the floor and cleaning out the trunk and giving it a good bath. One of the things he said struck me. He said, “It’s weird, because when my car is dirty and grungy, it’s like I expect more stuff to go wrong with it, and I don’t feel good about being in it.” To which I replied, well isn’t that such a parallel of our spiritual lives? In dream interpretation, a car represents personal ministry. So what does it mean when my car is dirty — windows obscured by dust and painted covered in road grime, floor littered with weeks of sand and old french fries, dashboard furry with dusty build-up. I can only infer that it would represent the state of my life. And I think that is true. When I am in a place of yielding to sin, and my vision is obscured by the grime of the world; when my heart and mind are cluttered with trash and dirt that I have tracked in or have allowed to be brought in and left there; when my engine is running poorly because I am not doing proper maintenance on it… then it is time for a complete car wash.

I am not talking about a quick “spray some water and slop some soap on it” kind of wash, but one of those “this is going to take most of my day” kind of cleanings. Where you scrub the whole car from top to bottom, wax and buff it, shine the wheels and bleach the white letters on the tires. When you completely declutter the interior, wipe down everything with a good smelling cleaner, vacuum everything and then do all the windows to a sparkling shine. And at the end, you hang a fresh Yankee Candle air freshener from the rearview mirror and just go for a drive just because it looks and feels so amazing to have taken a filthy thing and, with some hard work and sweat equity, have transformed it into a beautifully clean car.

So that’s my life sometimes. I need to do some major cleaning. It gets all junked up with gunk that I allow in and it obscures my vision and causes my heart to be cluttered with things that rob my joy. It causes me to expect things to go wrong because my focus is not on the joy in the journey, rather on the problems that clutter my mind and clamor for my attention. Laying aside the weights and the sin which does so easily beset us, says Paul in Hebrews 12:1, and look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Jesus, the one who is the point of my life here on earth. The one whom I can no longer see when my vision is obscured by the grime of this world (because I have neglected to fill my washer fluid reservoir) … no, because I have neglected to wash my eyes in the living water of the Word! There are so many verses that come to mind about walking clean before the Lord, and I suppose the most apropos one would be the one many of us know so well but often don’t do — “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from our unrighteousness” (I John 1:9).

Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow — Psalm 51:7

Cleanse us. Like a deep cleansing car wash, where the outside and the inside are clean and fresh and we start new again. Cleanse me and make me new… like  the old hymn says, There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains!