breathe in deeper now...

i was taking a shower the other day and realized i hadn’t used my exfoliating scrub stuff in a while. so, i grabbed it and as i did…i looked at what the bottle said – ‘exfoliates & purifies'. i thought…hmm…isn’t this just what God does for us? he cleanses us…scrubs away all of the dead stuff on the surface to reveal the shiny new beautiful stuff underneath.

so, as i was rubbing some into my leg (and inhaling the nice grapefruit fragrance) i felt my leg getting hot. i was startled at first, but then remembered that it was self-heating. it’d been so long since i’d used it that i forgot about that part. the more you rub, the hotter it gets on your skin. and again, i thought…that’s how we work.

we let stuff build up. and we don’t pray. it doesn’t bother us at first. then, by the time we start to notice…it’s gotten pretty bad and we decide to do something about it. so, we pray. we ask God to take this stuff from us. we ask Him to take away all of our impurities and make us clean again. but, we forget. we forget that it hurts. it hurts to get rid of stuff. sometimes we’re still holding on. sometimes He has to scrub extra hard. we forget that the harder we pray, the harder things get.

things usually heat up before they get better.

and the longer we hold on to things, the harder it is to let go of them. Jesus died on the cross for our sins so that we don’t have to. He has already been through everything we’ll ever have to go through. He is standing there with outstretched arms asking us to hand over our burdens…it’s up to us when we choose to lay them down.