please get out of the toilet

a very large part of my everyday routine is chasing my 13 month old son around our home cleaning up his messes. he seems to go from place to place like a wrecking ball destroying areas within our house. there is one area that has his toys in it and he usually plays there for about 10 minutes or until he has every toy out all over the floor. then he moves on to the shelves with my baskets on them and takes all the liners out of them and throws them and the baskets on the floor, everywhere. then he heads into the next room to find what else he can pull out and make a mess with. and, finally ends up in the kitchen emptying many cabinets of all of their belongings. i have a gate at the bottom of our stairs so usually he cannot get up there and i try to remember to keep the basement and bathroom doors closed to prevent further areas of disaster within our home. a lot of times i just let him go and clean up after him when he is napping. so if you ever come over to my house in the day and he is up. beware!

there are many forgetful people, including myself, who live in our home so very often the doors to the basement and the bathrooms get left open and the gate to the upstairs is left off. in those times who knows where i will find Jacob and his messes. but, there is always one place i always look first because it seems to be his favorite, the bathroom toilet! he is intrigued. he wants to play in the water and let anything he happens to be playing with, at the time he discovers someone forgot to close the bathroom door, go for a swim. it so disgusts me. the filthiest place in our whole house, a place created for dung and waste where germs live galore that could make him very sick, is place where he longs to return to over and over again.

so, today when i forgot to shut the bathroom door, like a shark smelling blood, within minutes, i heard water splashing. i went straight to the bathroom as fast as i could to rescue him and the toy he was trying to teach to swim. feeling a little frustrated that he keeps returning over and over again to such filth, i loudly said to him, "jacob, please get out of the toilet!" i picked him up and while i was cleaning him up, washing his hands and face with antibacterial soap and giving his toy an antibacterial bath too, i just kept thinking to myself why does he like playing in such filth? what is so attractive about it? he does not belong in the toilet with waste. he belongs on my lap or in his bed or in his high chair or in the rest of the house making his usual messes. these places are his domain of love with wonderful things for him. he isn't convinced that the the toilet is a bad place for him to play. he isn't convinced that he does not belong in the toilet and that it is not good for him to play in there. he isn't convinced that he could get very sick from it.

as i pondered these things in my head a thought occured to me about the lives we live here on this earth and how we as children of God living in His household always seem to find ourselves wallowing in the filth and waste of the world where the lies of the enemy fester and grow deadly sickness in our soul, things like self-pity, jealousy, strife, anger, pride, and unforgiveness. This filth results in us doing things that aren't righteous at all and that bring about destruction in our lives. and, i imagined God having the same thoughts toward us as He sees us returning to the same disgusting places over and over again saying to us, "get out of the toilet! you do not belong there. I delivered you from that filth, washed you clean, and set you up in a place that you do belong, next to me, on my right hand, living in my kingdom where there is righteousness, peace, joy and pleasures forevermore. this is the domain of love that I have made for you. please, get out of the toilet!"

so, again i asked myself that question, "why do we like playing in such filth? what is so attractive about it?" i think the answer is the same answer that i discovered with jacob. we just aren't convinced that it is bad for us. we aren't convinced that we do not belong in the places of waste and filth, that it is not good for us to play there. we aren't convinced that if we continue there it will make our soul very sick.