In John 9, Jesus heals a blind man in a pretty unconventional manner.
He doesn’t make a big speech.
He doesn’t replace the man’s eyes.
He doesn’t wave a wand.
He kneels down in the dirt and mixes some mud with his own saliva before applying the concoction to the man’s eyes.
The mud gave the man a new sight.
Other words for sight: New perspective. New reality. New vision.
Gut punch.
We spend our lives doing everything we can to avoid the mud pits. We want smooth transitions. We want victories without the fight. We want praise reports without dark spaces. And here we see a different, harder-to-embrace kind of truth: the mud gives us a new way of seeing things.
The mud grows us.
The mud transforms us.
The mud puts new songs in our mouths.
That last one is fully biblical. David writes in Psalm 40 that God plucked him out from the mud pit and put a new song in his mouth.
I think about the darkest seasons I’ve encountered and I cannot help but think God allows me to know the feeling of the mud and mire so that I can learn to love the new song in my mouth and not take the new normal for granted.
The hard seasons teach us how to be grateful.
How to lead others; how to see the world and all the pain in it through a different lens.
This is your choice every single day. With every hard moment that comes your way:
You can either let the present circumstances beat you up or you can choose to prosper in the mud pit.
You can change your perspective. You can praise in the dark. You can choose to love the mud that is forging a new song in your soul, a tale for the ones who will walk this same broken road one day.
It’s not a surprise to me that a lot of my closest people, the ones who get me the most-have also known the most darkness. When you face the dark and you fight your way through it, the way you look at things starts to change.
You no longer have time to spend talking about the small stuff or worrying about the trivial things. Your spirit is stamped with urgency because you understand that life is precious, and time is short, and gossip is futile. This world is far too broken to waste the days talking instead of activating the mission God placed in your court.
It’s because of the mud that I know how to sing long and hard.
It’s because of the mud that I have a ballad of gratitude deep in my heart.It’s because of the mud that I spend my days telling people about what God can do because I’ve seen the miracles and I know they’re worth every last breath I’ve got.
Don’t hate the mud. The miracle is just around the corner.
