Mire

In farming, there are many elements to battle. There are diseases, pestilence, weather, financial loss, fatigue, and emotionally there is sometimes a pendulum swinging between pride and self-defeat. Externally, I'd have to say my greatest enemy is mud.

Mire - "1. an area of wet, yielding earth; swampy ground. 2. deep mud or slush. 3. to smear or soil with mud; defile. 4. to entangle or entrap."

I hate battling mire because it makes what is normally difficult even more so. It reminds me of the Devil. Life is difficult enough, but then HE has to come along and make things even harder; and what more does he desire to do but to defile us and entrap us?

As I trudge out to do my chores on a muddy day, I splash mud on my skirts and then my dog (who loves mud and has been romping in it) runs to me and puts his muddy paws on me, soiling me further. I reach my milking station and proceed to fetch my milking goats. Let's just pretend I have to move a bag of grain to the barn...that means heaving a 50 lb bag on my shoulder and sloshing through mud to the barn. It sucks at my boots and when I step on a muddy rock, my foot slips. My walls are coated with mud. Mud seeps under the cracks in the floor soiling my fresh bedding and caking on my animals. It wedges itself in my goat's feet and causes them great pain and discomfort. They HATE trudging through the mud to the milk stand and I often have to drag them to it. My horses are so heavy that they take a muddy spot and make it a literal quagmire that you will likely lose boots in from their feet churning it into extremely soft and deep earth. Dirt. Filth. Pain. Weary.... it drains me.

What does Scripture have to say about mud?

"The pig washed itself only to wallow in the mud." -2 Peter 2:22.

"..Then he will bring me out to the light, and I will see his justice. My enemies will see it too, and shame will cover those who said to me, 'Where is Adonai your God?' I will gloat over them, as they are trampled underfoot like mud in the streets." -Micah 7:9-10.

"Your own close friends misled you and took advantage of you. Now that your feet are stuck in the mud, they have abandoned you." -Jeremiah 38:22.

"But the wicked are like the restless sea--unable to be still, its waters toss up mud and dirt." -Isaiah 57:22.

"I am sinking down in the mud, and there is no foothold; I have come into deep water; the flood is sweeping over me." -Psalm 69:2.

"God has thrown me into the mud; I have become like dust and ashes."-Job 30:19.

Mud generally doesn't have any positive connotations does it?

However, I cannot shake from my mind a story in which Jesus made mud and used it to heal someone: "As Yeshua passed along, he saw a man blind from birth. His talmidim asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned- this man or his parents- to cause him to be born blind?' Yeshua answered, 'His blindness is due neither to his sin nor to that of his parents; it happened so that God's power might be seen at work in him. As long as it is day, we must keep doing the work of the One who sent me; the night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, put the mud on the man's eyes, and said to him,' Go, and wash off in the Pool of Shiloach! (this name means "sent")'. So he went and washed and came away seeing." -John 9:1-7

What this means to me is that only Jesus can take something filthy to make something whole. Only Christ can take something that soils and ensnares you to restore someone. We are filthy and soiled because we are made of the dust of the earth and all we can produce of ourselves is more filthiness. John Wesley said,"Apart from the Spirit of God, all we can do is add sin to sin."

Christ alone is the firm ground we can stand on. When we are literally trudging through this filthy, wearisome, quagmire world....just know....there is One who tread it also....and He is Master of it. The earth beneath us is shifting (as we always are). God alone is constant. All things in the heavens are in motion except one thing--the sun. There is order in the heavens because they revolve around that one thing. What would the galaxy look like if Neptune revolved around Mars and the moon began to revolve around comets? Chaos! Destruction!

And so we walk circumspectly....we in clay tents. The Serpent feeds off the dust of the earth (and we are the dust of the earth). Behold, brethren: Christ's business is to take your filth and make you new. Don't be surprised if YOU are the dust he wants to spit on to help someone else see.