I’d just finished bathing my dog. Yaz was clean, fluffy to the point of being poufy and smelled oh-so pretty.
I clipped on his leash and started down the road for our morning walk. I stopped momentarily to respond to some phone messages. The decaying odor of roadkill suddenly assaulted my senses, and I looked up to find dear little Yaz happily rolling in the remains of a dead … something. Hard to tell what it was at this stage, just a pile of smelly bones and fur.
Why do they do it? Why do dogs insist on rolling in dead things? Ick. What are they thinking?
It occurred to me, as I dragged Yaz away from his folly, that people roll in dead things too. Not physical things like animal carcasses of course, but in the decaying guilt of past sins that we just can’t let go. We insist on digging up those buried dead things and rolling in them from time to time. It’s our own fault that our unresolved guilt resurfaces and reeks to high heaven.
The psalmist said, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has [God] removed our transgressions from us,” (Psalm 103:12 NIV). If we truly believed this, we wouldn’t keep a guilt shovel nearby to unearth past sins we have no business revisiting. Guilt revisited stinks.
Conviction. Pot. Kettle. Black.
So, I am newly committed to resolve my guilt over decomposing dead things that should have been mummified and forgotten long ago. And leaving them buried. I’m turning in my shovel. And my pitchfork. And my atomizer.
Do you need to stop rolling in any dead things too, my friend?
