Janitors for God

Among the many sayings in this life I wish I had thought of first was one I recently heard: We’re janitors for God cleaning up spiritual messes.

Doesn’t that take your breath away?

It’s quite a shock to us when we originally come to the realization that all those messes in our lives, big and little, horrible and silly, are to some extent honestly and truly our problems. Whether or not we created them on our own, to some extent we are responsible for their existence. Certainly, we can blame them on somebody else. So what? That does not suddenly change the veracity of the situation. Blaming our problems on other people does not make them disappear, regardless how much we wish they would.

Somebody needs to clean up the moral, ethical and spiritual messes in which we find ourselves. If we found them and we identified them for what they are, then it’s pretty clear that we’re the ones nominated to clean up those conundrums.

Let’s be clear about this. It’s going to take a good deal of spiritual dialysis to clean out whatever it is that’s mucking up our spiritual systems.

In most cases physical dialysis is not required every day and it’s structured to take a limited amount of time out of our day. Spiritual dialysis requires constant daily attention. Simply identifying something as a moral, ethical or spiritual problem does us no good. That’s like identifying there is a problem with our kidneys or bladder. It’s not enough. We have to take our spiritual medicine on a daily basis to keep…