Stained but Clean

After a winning day of baseball we were finally home to relax until....it hit me.  Sunday is a different uniform, it's not gray pants, but rather white pants.  Great!  The last time I saw Hunter's white pants were a couple of weeks ago after World Series, covered in red mud from where it had rained all week long.  They hadn't been cleaned with our mixture of oxi slash dawn slash comet slash muscle scrub and soak for three days technique.   I had no time to do that and by this time those stains were stuck for good, so I panic, but only for a minute.   Hunter and I run out of the house on a mad dash to Hibbets and grab another pair of stark white pants, the ones that are so unbelievably white, but only for like thirty minutes after he puts them on or at least until that first slide into a base.  Then it hit me, we are all like those pants.  Hear me out I know this sounds insane but think about it for a minute,  as Perry Noble says, "Let me unpack this for ya!"  We are born into this world brand new like those white pants.  We go through life trying our own ways, messing up, trying to live independently until we realize we cannot handle this life alone because we were not made that way.  Once we hit wall after wall of our own selfish motives we stop and think maybe my own way is not pleasing to Jesus.   Maybe he really does want me to come to Him for everything,  trust in Him to lead my life and rely heavily on His grace to sustain us every single day.   So we are stained like those white pants will be tomorrow about 9:35.  We go through life just like these pants acquiring stains that even if you scrub and scrub your life you can cover those stains up, but underneath the surface they are always still there.  Our life is the same way wondering aimlessly into the cruel world until we set our focus on Christ.  Once we accept that our ways are not always His ways and truly understand that it is all in His timing will we fully grasp His constant love for us as His children.   After the games tomorrow I will spray those stains, scrub and soak those pants but they will never be as white as they are right now and that's okay because they will still be clean. Our lives become clean once we accept Jesus into our hearts.  He takes us stained and broken, he knows our paths that we have  traveled how we acquired each stain and yet he loves us regardless.   We are all washed white as snow by the blood of Jesus.  There was only one perfect man named Jesus and he took our sins away.  So you might be broken and stained but you still have a home wrapped in the arms of Christ.  We are all stained.  These pants will never be stark white again, but just like our lives in Christ we are clean and the next time we step up to bat the game of life, we will have our own personal stain fighter leading the way, Jesus.