Vomit

I hate vomit. The smell of it is almost more than I can stand. I spent several years as a paramedic and saw all sorts of grotesque sites, but nothing that I saw affected me like the smells did. Gross.

So it is only fitting that the past couple of days I have had to help clean up vomit in my house as three of my four kids (and the fourth will probably start anytime now) have been throwing up. My wife is always by my side in cleaning up messes, but this time she has been afflicted by the same bug. So I've spent a good part of my day cleaning up unspeakable messes and steam cleaning parts of our carpet. It was about the same time just over a year ago where this same scenario played out in my family with me being the only one well enough to clean up all the mess.

Cleaning up the vomit of someone else is certainly a labor of love. No one truly enjoys doing it but how awful would it be if we were left to lie in our own junk all day if no one would help us clean it up? Imagine how terrible it would be if God left us alone in our own cesspool of sin and refused to clean our mess up for us. But that's not what He did, is it?

I love what Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8, "For while we were still helpless, at the appointed moment, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person—though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us!" While we sat in our own sinful puke, covered in terrible filthiness and helpless to clean ourselves up, Jesus died so that we might be purified and saved from our sin. What a beautiful and selfless picture of our great God!