Your Set of Steps

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Pool, pool, pool.  I have had a one-track mind over the weekend.  We’ve been trying to clear up our pool now for 4 weeks and so far it’s been unsuccessful.  All the yucky green stuff goes away but we are always left with milky water.  Now, stay with me because this whole post is not about our pool.  Although believe me, I could write a 1,000 word post on all my feelings about it right now.

One thing that always seems to hinder our pool-cleaning abilities is our steps.  They’re nice steps, not just the ladder steps but that means they’re huge and hard to move.  It’s imperative they get pulled out of the pool every year because algae likes to hide underneath the stairs and always starts a growth of algae even when the rest of the pool appears clean.  Well, clearly we are a hard-headed couple because for every year we’ve had the pool, we’ve never wanted to take out the steps at first.  The fact is the pool is always a green swamp when we open it and who in their right mind wants to climb in there, get out the 100 lbs bags of sand holding it down and then also push out the huge steps?  No one that I know. 

So our tactic to date has been to clear the pool up enough so you can see the bottom of the pool and then plan a big steps-removal day which completely clouds up the pool again but at least you get in a clean pool to get them out.  But really.  If we’d just get the steps out from the beginning we’d be so much better off.  But every single year we keep trying to ignore the algae-infested steps and try to clean the rest of the pool.  It never fails that it always causes so many problem after we take them out that it’s not worth ignoring them.  We kick ourselves and promise we’ll get the stairs out next year.

And as frustrated as I have been over these steps somehow God is using it to show me how life can get.  We try to clean up our life as best we can.  We decide we’ll read our Bible and listen to the right music.  We’ll get the right friends and say the right things.  We even go to church and Bible study every week.  But then there’s those darn steps.  That big bulky thing growing yucky stuff we try to ignore.  We think we can clean the rest of our life up but the truth is until we get that things out, God can’t truly do a redemptive work in our lives.

For those that have read my eBook Entangled, you can probably guess what my steps were a few years ago.  I was harboring a relationship from everyone I knew.  Hidden, inappropriate emails, conversations and feelings were my steps that I thought I could just ignore.  I could run my life just fine while continuing this relationship.  It took years but I finally hauled those steps out of my pool and only then could I see the destruction it left behind.  It took years to truly clean the remnants from my emotional affair but I see now how necessary it was. 

Perhaps you have your own set of steps.  It’s probably that hidden thing that you’re really not too proud of but you just can’t imagine not doing.  You think you can do life just fine with it but if truth be known, you know you need to cut it out.  Perhaps you have your own hidden relationship, an addiction to porn or like my sister had, an addiction to a video game.  Before you brush it off, let me warn you that your thing might not look too bad.  Perhaps yours is a junk food problem or too much TV or even a worrisome attitude.  Things in their own right are good and even necessary, but in excess cause major problems.

I don’t know what your steps are but I feel it way down deep today that someone has a set that need picked up and thrown out.  Take it from someone that’s learned the hard way:  jump in the nasty water and get them out stat.