Matthew 8:3 “Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’”
In 2005, a 16-year old girl called Katie Davis, left her comfortable middle class life in Tennessee, to go to an orphanage in Uganda. Three years later she set up her own orphanage and adopted 14 children. Her life in the USA was comfortable and clean. Although she grew up in a Christian family, she only prayed for her own comfort. Her dad went to visit her in Uganda to persuade her to come home, to leave behind the filth, stench, and sickness. But Katie knew God had called her to live and breathe and minister in that dirt. She left America as a princess but was soon washing off thick layers of dirt and filth from the poorest and most helpless in society.
Jesus knew what it was to leave the throne of heaven and to come and touch the unclean. It’s easy to follow the world’s view and to look at the outward appearance, at how clean people are. But God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16.7). He’s not bothered by a squeaky clean image, rather he’s after a longing heart.
Katie Davis soon realised that she couldn’t tell the street children in her orphanage that God loves them, because most were completely unaware of the concept of love. Instead she had to clean and hug and cradle and caress her filthy and smelly children so that they gradually learnt that she loved them. Then she told them about their heavenly Father.
Few of us are called to live in slums, but all of us are called to see beyond the dirt of the homeless, the smell of elderly incontinent, and even the masks of the self-sufficient – to see the person made in the image of God, and love them unconditionally. It’s about cleaning others by humbling and going beyond ourselves, and getting our hands dirty.
Lord, I choose to get dirty for you today. Amen!
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