A Picture of Sin

A few weeks ago I was engaged in the perilous adventure of cleaning our freezer out, or at least in giving it a half-hearted try. After all, one must be careful not to venture too far into cold and inhospitable territory, lest one not be able to extricate himself and return to warmth and safety.

It is particularly challenging when a freezer bag with liquid, like strawberry juice, has broken while not yet completely frozen and the sticky juice has descended on the walls of the freezer and covers the rails of shelves and wire baskets - making the baskets difficult to slide out, ensuring that you will skin your knuckles while pulling the storage baskets and attempting to free them and clean the juice off the inside of the freezer. 

I came upon a plastic container labeled, "Lentil Sausage Soup", it was dated 10-13-08. At first I thought I should get a calculator to figure out how long the soup had been in the freezer, but then I remembered that this is 2018 and once I realized it was simple math I concluded that the soup had been frozen for almost ten years. While finding something in our freezer that has been frozen for ten years is hardly like discovering a woolly mammoth in the Arctic, I still had a sense of discovery and was tempted to report my find to the Smithsonian. I realized that the soup needed to go.

I wonder how many things there are in my life that need to go. They may be temporarily frozen and inactive, but they are still there, lurking, waiting for the opportunity to thaw and sink and poison. I may think that since they haven't been odoriferous for a while that I can keep them, I may be foolish enough to think that I can master them - I am an idiot if I think that. 

One thing I've learned, though I may try to ignore it, is that frozen "stink" can thaw without notice, as if someone had placed it in a microwave at a mega setting. Of course only God can remove nasty things from our lives, and more often than not He does it as we submit to His Word and seek Him in prayer and humility. (Psalm 19).