To Sweep or Not to Sweep
In a Bible class I was in recently, we discussed making every decision based on God’s will. One lady protested that how we sweep is not a Christ-centered decision. Was she right? If I am fifteen years old and my mother just told me to sweep, the decision to sweep or not to sweep is a matter of obedience to God. I would argue that the same is true for me at sixty. If my mother wants me to sweep, I believe the honoring and respectful thing for me to do is to sweep.
If I am a cleaning fanatic and am too busy sweeping to serve people in need, my decision to sweep or not to sweep is again a matter of obedience to God.
The point, of course, is not rules about sweeping, but whether or not we have hearts willing to follow God completely, whether our feet are always ready to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
One of my tasks for Notgrass Company lately has been finding photos for our upcoming revision of Exploring America. I don’t know if this one will end up in the revision, but I like it. Ironically, it is about sweeping–not sweeping dust into a dustpan (or under a rug), but a call for the Democrats to make a clean sweep in the election of 1900.
I enjoyed reading the campaign poem on this bookmark. Evidently citizens have been worried about politicians adhering to the Constitution for at least a century. In that presidential election and every one since, voters have had to decide whether to sweep out one party or sweep in another.
Every four years we have the opportunity to make a decision about which point of view to choose as we vote in a presidential election. The decisions we make every day are more critical to us and our children. Every day we have the opportunity to make every decision based on God’s point of view. We have daily opportunities to model that to our children and daily opportunities to train them to do that, too.
Whatever you do in word or deed,
do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks through Him to God the Father.
Colossians 3:17, NASB