A WORD FOR TODAY, March 21, 2025
Peggy Hoppes
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Blessings. Peg
A WORD FOR TODAY, March 21, 2025
“Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions. My sin is constantly before me. Against you, and you only, I have sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight, so you may be proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge. Behold, I was born in iniquity. My mother conceived me in sin. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts. You teach me wisdom in the inmost place. Purify me with hyssop, and I will be clean. Wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness, that the bones which you have broken may rejoice. Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all of my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me. Don’t throw me from your presence, and don’t take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Uphold me with a willing spirit.” Psalm 51:1-12, WEB
I was driving down the highway one day when a plastic shopping bag flew into my car and got caught on my side mirror. I thought it would blow off on its own, but it was stuck there by the force of the wind. I considered opening my window to pull it off, but it was whipping violently, so trying would be more dangerous. It wasn’t a distraction, just an annoyance. I decided to wait until I stopped, but it fell off as I slowed down, which meant it was free to fly into someone else’s car.
We joke about the bright yellow Dollar General bags. The small-town discount store has popped up everywhere in the past few years, sometimes in the strangest, most out of the way places. How do they get there? DG bags are DG store seeds! If a DG bag lands in an open field, there will be a brand-new store in a week. We carried a DG bag in our car during one road trip, thinking that we should “plant” it in a place where there seems to be no place for the locals to shop. We wouldn’t have, of course, but it made us laugh numerous times as we were driving in sparsely populated places in Texas. I joke about letting the bags go, but those plastic bags can be a real problem and an eyesore.
It is amazing how those bags can catch the wind and fly for miles until they get caught on something like my car or a tree branch. They look almost graceful dancing in the wind, but they are dangerous. I was lucky, but those bags can cause accidents if they get caught in a way that blocks a driver’s view. They can end up in jet engines. They can kill wildlife. I have seen fields filled with all sorts of plastic things caught on tree branches and chicken wire fences. The breeze blows them constantly and they eventually become ripped and ragged. I often wonder how there could be so many bags in one place. It is possible that the winds just blow in a pattern that allows them to settle in those places or the fact that there are so many trees in the way of the prevailing winds.
I don’t know how the bags escape. They are so lightweight that they are easily caught in the wind pushed high and far so quickly that it is impossible to get them back. Unfortunately, few of us have the time or the means to catch them, so we let them go. We don’t bother running after a loose bag, leaving it to be someone else’s problem. Most of them are just an ugly nuisance, but even just one of many that causes an accident or kills a critter is one too many. We just drive by, shaking our heads at the irresponsible person who let those bags fly, but few of us would even consider collecting and disposing them properly. Who has the time to worry about a few bags on the side of the road?
Lent is a time when we look deeply into our lives, realizing that our sin is much like the bags that get caught in the trees and fences at the sides of the roads. Most of our sin is an ugly nuisance, but we are capable of sin that is dangerous. We don’t know how it became part of our life. We fail to resist the actions and inactions of others, so sin grabs a hold of some part of us. It might even appear to have grace and beauty, but it is ugly and dangerous, especially when our sin affects others. And all sin affects others, even when it doesn’t seem so. As Christians, we are called to help one another, to be there for our brothers and sisters, so that our sin does not continue to blow in the breeze causing our lives to become ripped and ragged. Like those bags, if we let sin go, everything becomes worse as time goes on
Lent is a time for contemplating our sinfulness, and when we follow Lenten disciplines in the company of other Christians it is a time for helping one another clean up our fields. Are we ignoring the problems? Are we too lazy to find a way to help? Do we refuse to cross those fences that our fellow Christians have put up to keep us out of their business? Are we building fences so that others cannot help us? Let us seek God’s help to work together to clean up our fields, sharing God’s mercy and grace and cleansing, so that by Easter our lives will look more like a beautiful meadow of wildflowers than an ugly field of garbage.
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