“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”

1st Corinthians 13:12

I moved my oldest son, Ethan, into his sophomore college house just over a month ago. We packed his things and loaded them into the vehicles, drove to school, and unloaded them. That was the easy part. The real work was in cleaning the room before setting things up.

He’s in a house shared with 3 other guys, and it had other guys in the house last year. There’s a common area, and each bedroom has its own bathroom. And, well, let’s just say the “cleaning crew” missed some spots in getting things move-in ready. Not that I blame the house management company. The house was what I expected it to be. It is college after all.

Even still, it meant that unloading the vehicles was the easiest part of the day. It was time to clean.

I took the bathroom area and got to work. I Clorox wiped the counters, tub, and commode. I went over all of it twice for good measure and probably used about 7 different wipes just to make sure. I vacuumed and dusted the sink cabinet, washed the floors, and cleaned the mirror. Well, I cleaned the mirror about 4 times. It was grimy and gross. The gunk that was on it was thick—but it was nothing compared to the bathtub.

In college housing fashion, this bathtub was in such bad shape that you needed to shower after getting out of the shower. I don’t think the previous occupant knew what it meant to clean. I thought it was really badly stained when I first walked in. It wasn’t a stain. It was just a dark filth that streaked down the shower wall. The textured floor of the shower was so grimy and gross that the textured grooves were filled in with muck. It was among the nastiest bathtubs I’ve seen—and I was once a college student who didn’t know what cleaning products were either.

Thankfully, one of Ethan’s roommates had a hand steamer; the kind that spits out steam to melt away filth and germs. I filled that baby up and waited for it to get to temperature. I pressed the lever on the wand and started to steam the worst parts of the tub. And it worked. Kind of. The brush was too small, and the tub was too big. It was a slow and tedious process. It slowly removed the “stain” along the wall. And it was effective at loosening the grime on the floor of the tub. But it took effort and patience.

Have you ever been cleaning something, and you watch the dirt disappear? It is such a rewarding experience in the moment. You see progress in real time. I was in this moment as I was on my hands and knees in the bathroom. It was working.

And then I stopped for a second to let my hands rest. As my eyes returned to my work, it was clear that the progress I made was far less complete than I originally thought. I made a dent—but it was still far from clean.

There was still more cleaning to be done…

And such it is in this life. Sin and our rebellion have left a layer of filth and stain across all of us. We are covered by its repugnant stench.

Nothing you can do will clean these stains. You can’t wash away the filth of your sin.

The only cleaning solution is the blood of the lamb. The only way to be made clean is through Jesus and His blood. It’s Jesus—it’s always been Jesus.

And yet, resisting and pushing back against evil is part of our calling. You and I will never get the stain out. But it is a noble and holy calling to keep scrubbing.

Or, using Paul’s words from 1st Corinthians, we may only see in a mirror dimly now. Sin has left a layer of muck that distorts everything. What would it look like to get a bottle of Windex and start buffing that mirror? Even if you will never get it fully clean—it seems to me that working to make the mirror as clean as possible is a pretty good pursuit as we wait till the day when we can see the Lord face to face.

Said another way—our world was dumped into another tragedy last week: the senseless murder of Charlie Kirk and another school shooting. The wanton violence and the aftermath of ongoing political commentary continue to be a stain across this great nation. Our inability to seek the best in one another and our growing ability and willingness to divide people into sides—those who are with us and those who are against us—is a filth grosser than a college guy’s bathroom. And it certainly isn’t cleaned up easily.

I don’t have solutions. I don’t know how we restore civility to our partisan identity politics. We didn’t get here overnight and we won’t find our way out of it overnight either. But here is the challenge I’m trying to live into this week. I want to walk through my days with a bottle of Windex in my hand. I want to do whatever I can to try and clean that mirror today even as I wait for the day when we see Him face to face. Mind you, I’ll never get it all the way clean. But I can try.

These three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love…

What is a cleaning project you can undertake in the week ahead? Turn it into a spiritual exercise as well