ForgottenWoman

Don’t Worry about it; It’s TOO Badly Soiled

“What’s that all over your sweatshirt, son?”

“Oh, that’s tar.”

“Well, give it to me and let me see if I can get it off!”

“Mom, it’s ruined. I didn’t realize what we were doing at work today or I wouldn’t have worn it, but it’s too late now.”

Yes, this was a real conversation between me and one of my sons a couple of weeks ago. Today – two weeks later I handed him a sweatshirt that no longer has hardened, black tar all over it. He laughed at me when I said I was taking the challenge on. His sisters laughed at me and told me I was wasting my time and energy. But, you have to realize this is a woman who has been through literally decades of a small army’s white and gray baseball and softball uniforms. I’ve learned a few things along the way and I’m really stubborn to boot!

This morning I presented him with a really nice-looking sweatshirt…

Was it easy? NO! Would it have been easier if he had come home with the shirt while it was still fairly fresh and ‘soft’? Probably. But the hardened mess that I tackled was pretty daunting. If you’ve never dealt with tar on clothing, then I’ll try to explain what had to happen. I tried scraping it off with a knife and it didn’t move. I then decided that I should try to soften the tar – and that took many applications of spot cleaner, soaking, and then scraping again. My hands hurt. My arms hurt and my shoulders and back began to hurt. I was working for hours to save this favorite sweatshirt. Little by little, I worked my way through what seemed like layers of hardened goop that really wanted to hang onto the fabric. Once I had removed everything that I could feel; there was the ‘stain’ left that indicated where the tar had once been. That took another several days of spot cleaning and soaking and scrubbing. This morning I did the final soaking and washing and then dried a sweatshirt that looks perfectly new unless you take a flashlight and examine it closely. When you do this, you see a very slight faded ‘shadow” everywhere that once a hardened blob of black tar had been. As I held it up and looked at it today, I realized that this very faint shadow that was left is a reminder to me of what was once there, that has been washed away not by my son, but by me, his mother who did what had to be done because I love him.

You guessed it. I see a spiritual parallel here. It’s not perfect, of course; but oh how hardened our hearts can become when we allow sin to become a part of us. The longer we leave it without dealing with it, the more hardened every part of us becomes. Once we decide we need to take our sinful hearts to the throne of grace and seek help; we’ve got layers of yuck that have to be worked through! Jesus did the hard work for us to be washed clean. He suffered pain physically and in every way imaginable so that we could have the eternal effects of sin removed from our lives. God’s forgiveness is all-encompassing, but we have to give Him our hearts that have been hardened by sin and ask Him to do what only He can do! When we hand our lives over to Him, seek His cleansing, forgiveness, and healing, He makes us like new! And guess what? We are often left with the memories, the wounds (shadow) that remind us of what was once attached to us and determined to remain a part of our lives. Those reminders should cause us to run to our Father with grateful hearts for what He has cleansed from our lives (with much more excitement even than my son is feeling toward me for ‘cleansing’ his beloved sweatshirt.)