From The Mud Puddle

We always buy Arm and Hammer vent filters for our house heat pump/air conditioner. We buy the kind that are suppose to help suck various allergens out of the air, away from our breathing passages and onto the filter. The filters themselves have a cardboard brown frame, with white as the filter. We change it more often than recommended since it seems we have to baby our air conditioner . Every week or so, one of us will pull it out and look at it, asking the same question, "Hey, do you think this is dirty"? Sometimes its fairly obvious, but sometimes...it's hard. White next to white is easy to see...but without having the measure of white right next to it, off white, or dirty white can be mistaken for white. The dirt is so gradual in how it builds up, that sometimes its hard to know if we should change it yet if we don't have a clean white filter right there with us to compare it. We had to change our filter today, as our air conditioner seems to be not working well again. (I should say AGAIN..in all caps for emphasis) That in itself is another story.

As I was thinking about the difficulty in knowing if the filter was dirty, I started thinking about how it is like sin. How easy it is for sin to creep in...little by little-where we don't see the gradual change right off. At times even, we look at our lives and say.."Oh Im not so bad"....because we are not comparing it to something pure white. Jesus is that pure white, that pure measurement that we need to know and see that we are dirty, and in need of a change. There is so much of the world we have to filter out of our lives...sometimes that that we filter begans to stick to us and it makes us dirty. Our lives dont run right when our filters are dirty. We are not as clear about things...and we do not run as efficiently as we should.

May our measurement always be Jesus Christ and His word. He is our pure and true measure.