The Weekly Word - A Devotion for the Week of June 15
“While I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.” Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing. -- John 9:5-7
Why the mud, we might wonder? He’s Jesus, after all. Couldn’t he simply have laid His clean hands over the man’s eyes and healed him that way?
This mud serves as an appropriate metaphor for our journey in faith. Sometimes our circumstances look worse, at least on the surface of things, before they get better. Sometimes we need to walk into an even deeper darkness, where our path is obscured and the end point is unclear, before we are able to find our way again. Sometimes we even find ourselves in the gritty, messy, muddy underbelly of things before we are able to walk into the light.
Jesus used mud on the blind man’s eyes for a reason. Perhaps it was to tell us that cleansing, renewal and rebirth isn’t always a neat, pretty, clean process. Sometimes cleansing, renewal and rebirth require grit before we get to the glory.
Heavenly Father, I’ll be honest: I don’t love the gritty, muddy, messy part of rebirth and renewal. But I trust You know which path is best for me, even when that path includes some unsavory parts. Thank You for loving me, even when I am not at my best. Amen.