Everyone needs an Aunt Dorothy…. an aunt who can bake and cook up a storm, keep an immaculate house, love her kids to pieces AND…. can paint a cow on a piece of wood that looks ready to walk into the barn. Yup. Our kids were so blessed to have Aunt Dorothy. She gave that cow to our boys for their birthdays one year.
As time moved on, Bessie disappeared for awhile… and then showed up one day. Weird how that happens. I carefully hung her near the stairs in the basement, where the little guys would be reminded often to “Trust in the Lord.”
Many moons later, after the boys were all grown up and married, I went rushing past the cow one day… and stopped in my tracks. Wait…. something looked wrong. Inspecting a little more carefully, I read, “Rust in the Lord.” The “T” was gone. I stood and stared at ol’ Bessie… hearing a sermon at full volume as well as a quiet whispering in my heart… As I pondered the message, I felt the need to pray… “Dear Lord, help me never to rust in You.”
Rust is a very strange product. Although I know that you really couldn’t care less, rust is produced when the oxygen and moisture in the air react with metal and form hydrated oxide (rust.) If you were deeply concerned about your tools rusting, which I’m sure you are, you would research in depth, and find that the best way to keep them from rusting is to use them. Class dismissed.
Come… let’s take a walk… back thousands of years… to an outrageously gorgeous spot called the Garden of Eden. Here, God created man and woman, and enjoyed a wonderful relationship with them. We get a peek into the heart of God as He calls out in the garden, “Where are you?”
Then sin ruined everything. But our God didn’t give up. He chose to continue pursuing us… and sacrificed His only Son on the cross to bridge the gap between Him and us. He relentlessly continued to battle for a relationship with His created people.
When we come to the place of total surrender to Him… and He restores us to that place of closeness through believing in His Son, Jesus Christ, we then begin to understand the purpose for which we were created. Slowly the scales are peeled back from our eyes, and we see more clearly that God has an amazing purpose for our being here. The words in the Bible seem to all of a sudden become alive, refreshing, challenging, inspiring and nourishing.
Then… if we aren’t careful… life begins to come between us and our loving Heavenly Father. Daily stuff… crazy schedules, disappointments, imbalanced priorities, expectations, the unexpected, illness, loss …. pandemics. And there sits our Bible… covered in the dust of a distant relationship.
And we rust.
As we rush about, working so hard at what amounts to so little, we don’t realize that the rust is making life so much tougher. We forget our purpose. We aren’t being used as planned. Gone is the original shine, that once reflected the love of our Creator. Yes… gone is the trust. Deeper still is the rust.
But God still calls, “Where are you?” He is just waiting… to brush away the rust, pour in His joy and grace, restore you to the one that He created you to be, reminding you that you can always, completely trust… in Him.
Lord, help me never to rust in You again.