April 11, 2020
Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God. Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. (1 Peter 1:17-23)
After more than thirty years of following Jesus I have come to believe that he uses things from everyday life that we are familiar with to teach us something deeper about himself, his kingdom and us. In my case, he often uses things related to engineering or farming such as the time he showed me how the working of an electrical circuit could help me understand how the Holy Spirit works in us. There have many such times he showed me things but the most profound one was related to cotton harvest.
When my parents were young, before the use of mechanical cotton harvesting equipment was common, they picked cotton by hand. They would pull the cotton lint from the open bolls and leave behind the burr and most of the leaves and other trash. My mother told me stories of how difficult the work was and how her hands would swell up from bites from spiders that would hide in open cotton bolls.
As hard as picking cotton was it had one advantage over cotton stripper machines that became common when I was growing up. Hand-picked cotton produced a better grade of cotton lint. The cotton stripper machines would literally strip everything from the cotton stalk including the cotton lint, the burr holding the lint, leaves and bark from the plant stalk. Everything but the cotton lint and its associated seed was considered to be trash that had to be removed in the cotton ginning process. Depending upon the effects of weather there could be enough trash in the cotton lint that it caused it to receive a lower grade after the ginning process. A lower grade meant a lower price for the cotton lint.
Into Module Builder
Several years ago I went through a time of severe anxiety coupled with some depression. I had never experienced such a thing and sought out help from a Christian counselor. The counselor’s approach was to pray and ask Jesus to bring thoughts to my mind and to let that thought lead to successive thoughts that would eventually land on something significant where Jesus would give me insight into my struggles. It was in this session that Jesus spoke to me through a memory of cotton harvest. In the memory, I was running a cotton module builder which is used to compact a large volume of freshly stripped cotton into a more compact form that would later be hauled to the cotton gin. In the memory I could see the cotton in the module builder but it was different from my actual experience. The cotton was as white as snow without even a hint of the trash that would have normally been present. As I pondered this I realized that the farmer plants cotton seed to produce a harvest of cotton lint and more seed. His goal is not to produce trash that degrades the quality of the cotton but the presence of some amount of trash was inevitable.
So what does this have to do with the scripture at the beginning of this article? God our Father chose us before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in face to face on-going fellowship with him. However, in my cotton harvest memory Jesus showed me that because we live in a fallen world that it is impossible to walk through this life without its trash getting on us. As a young man I was stained by the trash of pornography, sexual immorality and other sin. However, Jesus, the Eternal Son of the Father entered into the brokenness of all of humanity at his birth. His mission was to reveal the true nature of our Father and gather up all of humanity in his arms as he died upon the cross to present us to his Father as holy, blameless and without spot or wrinkle. We have been born of imperishable seed that will reproduce kind-after-kind. This is the mystery of the Gospel …..that Jesus has accepted me into his life and he now lives in me and will produce fruit consistent with his life through me. That is truly good news!
Even though we cannot gather with other saints this year for celebrating Resurrection Day, let us through Jesus continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise–the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.
Blessings,
Kevin