let them be clean

i was reading last night in acts. i was reading in acts 10 and something struck me in this description of peter's vision:

11He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. 13Then a voice told him, "Get up, Peter. Kill and eat." 14"Surely not, Lord!" Peter replied. "I have never eaten anything impure or unclean." 15The voice spoke to him a second time,

"Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."

now, like everything else in the bible, this passage has a very important historical context (jews, mosaic law, gentiles, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah), but what struck me is the the part that i have so conveniently set apart in red.

this line spoke to me because there is something very specific in my life on which i have completely given up, something that i can't even imagine fixed, something i have have, very simply, called impure. in fact, only an hour or two before i read this, i was explaining to someone else, someone with more faith in the situation than me, why i have a hard time believing for rectification , why i find myself wanting only permanent brokenness, because my mind cannot conjure an image of wholeness.

i'm sure i'm not alone in this - when some person or situation very close to us, causes so much pain to us and/or to those we love, we just want it to end. we want the dying animal dead because we cannot imagine a world in which it were healthy and well again. it hurts us too much to hope for something that seems so far, so utterly impossible.

it is so much easier to ask God for the things we can easily imagine coming true, things we might actually be able to accomplish ourselves, naturally. these things are easy because we call them an exercise in faith, when really, we knew all along that the chances of success were very good. believing God for something we think is impossible - that's something different. there, we have something to loose, we leave ourselves vulnerable to hurt and disappointment.

and so, i am dipping my toe in the pool of real faith. i don't like it. it makes me uncomfortable. i would rather not do it.

but, i do want to learn to trust, to have real faith, to depend on something other than my own ability.

i do not want to call the things that God has made clean, impure.
i want to call them clean.
i am, after all, one of those things.