As my mother prepares to get the house ready to sell, one of the big jobs was to pressure-wash the back deck, steps, and huge concrete pad below it. That job fell to me yesterday, and I realized that it was strangely gratifying to pressure-wash: as I told my father, it’s like vaccuuming only you can see your results immediately and drastically.

At one point, I was trying to hold the nozzle up above my head and blast my feet to clean them off so as not to track over what I’d already done. I let the nozzle come down at such an angle that, before I knew what had hit me, a 3100 horsepower blast of water shot at a 25° arc from two inches away slammed my shin—I had just unintentionally exfoliated a three-inch rectangular swath of skin straight off of my leg.

That got me to thinking. First and foremost, don’t clean human flesh with an instrument that can splinter wood and blast years of accumulated muck off of a driveway. Shortly thereafter, that God both is and is not like a pressure-washer. He is, in that—insofar as we are comparable to concrete pads—when we yield to His love, He blasts the guilt and hatred out of our hearts in little strips. This is called sanctification, and though the work won’t be complete in this life, it’s a good and necessary process that sometimes hurts. A lot. (And sometimes it happens in prayer before we know what hits us.) And He’s not like a pressure-washer in that He’s much, much more gentle, and will never force His love on anyone. That’s why we Christians are a curious lot: we submit ourselves to an often-painful blast of love to rid ourselves of dirt that seems perfectly acceptable to most people.

Thought you gentle readers might get a kick out of that.

As my mother prepares to get the house ready to sell, one of the big jobs was to pressure-wash the back deck, steps, and huge concrete pad below it. That job fell to me yesterday, and I realized that it was strangely gratifying to pressure-wash: as I told my father, it’s like vaccuuming only you can see your results immediately and drastically.

At one point, I was trying to hold the nozzle up above my head and blast my feet to clean them off so as not to track over what I’d already done. I let the nozzle come down at such an angle that, before I knew what had hit me, a 3100 horsepower blast of water shot at a 25° arc from two inches away slammed my shin—I had just unintentionally exfoliated a three-inch rectangular swath of skin straight off of my leg.

That got me to thinking. First and foremost, don’t clean human flesh with an instrument that can splinter wood and blast years of accumulated muck off of a driveway. Shortly thereafter, that God both is and is not like a pressure-washer. He is, in that—insofar as we are comparable to concrete pads—when we yield to His love, He blasts the guilt and hatred out of our hearts in little strips. This is called sanctification, and though the work won’t be complete in this life, it’s a good and necessary process that sometimes hurts. A lot. (And sometimes it happens in prayer before we know what hits us.) And He’s not like a pressure-washer in that He’s much, much more gentle, and will never force His love on anyone. That’s why we Christians are a curious lot: we submit ourselves to an often-painful blast of love to rid ourselves of dirt that seems perfectly acceptable to most people.

Thought you gentle readers might get a kick out of that.