The Tediousness Of Shoveling

It has been established that there are a few things I do not like to do.
They must get done, so I do them.
I have to try very hard to find some redemptive value in these particular jobs.
Perhaps doing them for those I love is enough.

The first job on my list that I do not enjoy doing is ironing.
I find that even shirts that are no iron have to be ironed.
I tend to wait until I have quite a bit of shirts hanging in the laundry room.
When I see ten of my husband’s shirts, I know that it is time to get out the ironing board.

Maybe if I got to the washer a bit faster I could forego ironing.
If the shirts are not pulled out right away, there are wrinkles.
My mother loved to iron.
I really do not understand that at all.

As a little girl, I remember pleading with her to allow me to iron.
She would get out pillowcases and sprinkle them with water from a bottle.
I loved to hear the iron sizzle a bit as I went back and forth over the cotton.
I loved the way the sun-kissed pillow cases smelled right off the clothes line.

That was then.
Fast forward to the days of have-to ironing.
It is a different story.
Gone are the days of my pleads to iron.

Second on my list of jobs I dislike is wrapping gifts.
Some people love to wrap presents.
They make the packages look so lovely.
They add a bit of whimsy to each one.

I am a gift bag kind of person.
Even then, I do not have the knack of putting tissue paper in the bag just so.
I have received gift bags that are truly a work of art.
My gift bags hide the present inside with very little fanfare.

Maybe it was because I always had so much wrapping to do at Christmas time.
Maybe it was because I was on a time crunch to get the wrapping done before they came home.
I would take breaks; I would listen to my favorite music.
Nothing seemed to make the job enjoyable.

I love choosing gifts for people.
I love selecting just the right thing.
I love seeing their reaction when they open it.
I could just as easily hide the gift behind my back for the same effect.

The third job that I do not enjoy doing is shoveling snow.
I only shovel snow if it is push-able.
If it is heavy, wet snow, someone else has to do it for me.
If my husband is home, he does the shoveling.

We have hired a snow plow person when there is a lot of snow.
It is the in-between snowfalls that are tricky.
Sometimes it is too little snow for the plow to come.
However, even too little snow has to be shoveled away.

That is my struggle.
I am simply moving snow from over here and putting it over there.
I am pushing snow across the driveway to deposit it along the side.
I am tossing snow this way and that so our walkway is clear.

The word, monotonous, always cones to mind.
Push here.
Deposit there.
Go back over what I just shoveled to get the remaining snow.

I know it is necessary, but the task is tedious.
I always think I could be doing something better with my time.
As much as the tediousness of the job is a problem, having a clean driveway is rewarding.
The clear walkway is important especially if it is going to freeze over night.

As I shoveled the latest little bit of snow off the walkways, I thought of sin.
How many times do we think that by shoveling our sin over here, we will be just fine?
How often do we pile our sin up over there and think that it is far removed from us?
How thorough a job are we doing when we do the shoveling ourselves?

Shoveling our sin away can very often become an elephant in the room.
We think that we have removed it.
We look and see piles and piles of our sin heaped up on the sidelines.
The piles remain long after we think we removed the sin successfully.

As far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
(Psalm 103:12)

There is only One who is the Master Shovel-er.
There is only One who can remove our sins completely so that they are never seen again.
There is only One who is capable of cleansing our hearts.
There is only One who removes the piles we tend to leave behind.

Our Lord Jesus is the Master Shovel-er.
If we put our finger on the East and the West side of a globe, our fingers will never meet.
So completely our Master Shovel-er removes the heaps of our sin.
Even the piles do not remain.

We are clean.
We are forgiven.
We are white as snow.
Not a pile to be found, anywhere.