Psalm 40: 1-3
I waited patiently for the Lord;
And He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay,
And He set my feet upon a rock making my footsteps firm.
He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God;
Many will see and fear
And will trust in the Lord. NASB
This is just a random though that came to me yesterday when I was listening to Psalm 40 on the way to church. I was just thinking how often I've been pulled out of the muck and mire. It seems I've got an affinity for it! Perhaps it goes back to my childhood, growing up on a farm in Illinois. With 300 acres of farm land, cows, hogs, and chickens, there was plenty of muck and mire to get into. We even had a special kind of nasty clay that we called gumbo (not at all like the southern seafood kind). Gumbo was a black clay that was hard as a rock when dry and impossible to dig up, but when wet it would pull in the biggest vehicle. Anything you tried to drive over it would get sucked in, down to the axles, and you would need a much bigger tractor to pull it out.
With all this muck and mire outside, my Mother's eternal mission was to keep it out and to keep the house clean. Every time that I would drag some sort of mess in, she would exclaim "What! Were you raised in a barn? Clean that up!". But to my irony impaired brain, this didn't make a lot of sense. The completely logical answer was, "Yes, I spend a lot more time in the barn, chicken yard and pig pens than in the house." Of course, I eventually came to understand that she was making a plea to to keep the barn mess out of her house, and to leave my muddy boots and all the other muck on the back porch!
To my father, the muck and mire was a way of life, but he taught me to patiently keep order and cleanliness wherever possible. When you have cows in the barn, you are inevitably going to get a lot of muck. Even Proverbs 14:4 says "Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, But much revenue comes by the strength of the ox." So the answer is not to try to live in a world without muck, but to clean it out whenever necessary. One of the never ending tasks on a farm was to muck out the barn and hen house. You can put down straw for awhile to hide it and dry it up, but sooner or later, it's going to get so deep that the cows can't even walk into the barn so you have to clean it out. The chicken house was the worst. It was always my job to take care of the chickens, and cleaning out the hen house was the worst job ever. It's not only dirty, but smells so strong of ammonia that you can hardly breath. But in the end, you have a clean barn so the cows and chickens are happy and healthy, and as a bonus, you can spread the manure on the fields to fertilize the crops.
So maybe that's why I always seem to betting stuck in the muck and mire and have to call on the Lord to pull me out and set my feet on the rock one more time. I do hope that there is some fertilizer somewhere in there, after my barn has been cleaned out, so that something good can grow out of all my mischief!
Psalm 40 - Sons of Korah
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