Dust

The other day, I was prompted to remember a common scene from my childhood. I lived on a farm and often went to the nearby grist mill to have grain ground for the cattle. The man who ran the machinery always looked odd to me because he had a fine layer of dust on his face. What particularly intrigued me were his dusty eyebrows. I’d never seen anything just like that before, or since, for that matter.

He’d put an empty bag under the grain chute and pull the slider back. The powdery mixed grain we called “chop” flowed down almost like liquid. Rising out of the bag as the stream of chop hit the bottom of the bag would billow a great cloud of fine powder. It enveloped the mill worker and added to the ever growing accumulation of dust that coated the inside of the mill.

In warmer weather, when the open door let the sunlight stream in, it was an impressive sight. As a child, I didn’t think much about this, but as I reflected back on it, I got thinking about this familiar scene at a deeper level. There was an interesting interplay between the light and the dust.

When the door was shut and the dim electric light illuminated the interior of the mill, there wasn’t very much to see. It was only when the sunlight flooded in that I could see the airborne dust particles. Outside, where there was no dust, I didn’t notice the light. It was only when both the light and the dust were present that both were revealed.

So here’s how this went together in my head. Think of the dust particles as the selfish, unkind, cruel, wicked things in your life. When you’re surrounded by people just like you, those negative things are almost unnoticeable. Think of the sunlight as the truth of God, His law, His presence. When that shines into your life, suddenly all of that “dust” becomes very visible. The light, by itself, is invisible. You can’t see it at all, but it shows up the contamination in the air in a dramatic way.

Now what do we do with this? In industry nowadays, dust control is an issue. We understand that airborne particles can damage the health of mill-workers and eventually even kill them. Sin does the same to us. It diminishes the quality of our life and then takes it.

God doesn’t merely want to shine His light on our lives and show us all of the contamination. Through the death of the Lord Jesus, He provided a way for us to deal with that. Listen to what John, a personal friend of Jesus wrote: “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7 ESV)

Ron Hughes
© January 2009