Step to Purity

"Purge me from my sin, and I shall be pure;  wash me, and I shall be clean indeed."

 - Isaiah 51:8

I remember the days of my youthful spiritual excitement.

I would long for this, would pray with fervor that God would make me pure, holy, righteous, as Christ is.

I begged for God's cleansing. I wanted to be so pure and faithful that I could move mountains.

But it turns out the purification process is accomplished by way of a thing call "life." And then you don't fully arrive until you wake up from death and do a sort-of debriefing of how it went.

Holiness comes from two steps forward, one step back. My youthful desire and exhilaration was so me-focused, that even though I kept myself sexually pure, even though I made selfless career choices, even though I never swore, and tithed regularly . . . I was still pretty rotten, because it was all about me.

Little kids do not like taking baths. And we don't like having to endure the cradle-to-grave endless nonsense. As George Harrison said "But it takes so long." Indeed it does.

And so perhaps the first step on the road to purity, is patience. And I'm far from mastering that one.