My mother understood entropy better than any physicist or engineer I’ve ever known. Every spring and every fall Mom did top to bottom, side to side cleaning, clearing, creating, and curating of our house and all the stuff in it, including us kids – my wife is the same way. Likewise, Dad did repairs, remodeling, and general rummaging about, under Mom’s direction – that part didn’t stick to me. Twice each year she fought the good fight against entropy, the decay of matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity per the second law of thermodynamics. She won all the battles except for the biological ones. The kids grew up, Mom and Dad grew old, and, eventually, entropy won.
Many people are knee-deep in fall cleaning. This battle means more than a clean home, it is our attempt at keeping active what once was vibrant. Most of us will fail quickly, all will fail eventually. Still, the fight is worth the effort. For a Christian, we have a kind of spiritual entropy with which we rally against. It’s different from that of the world. We don’t lose our salvation; our spiritual condition does not return to some inert uniformity. No, we are made alive in Christ (Ephesians 2:5). This is not by us but by Jesus who lives in us. Jesus imparts to us a vibrant life that is active now and will be fully manifested once the shackles of this world are thrown off.
However, we are not yet fully escaped from spiritual entropy. As we walk through this world, its “dust” clings to us, attempting to return us back to its process of decay. We need to get that worldly dust off us. Though it reminds me of Mom, it is Jesus who taught us the importance to clean the world off our feet. This was memorialized when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. You can read the whole account in John, chapter 13. The verse I want to close with is verse ten, where Jesus says to Peter, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean…“
Already, as a Christian, the laws of this old physical world have no hold on our lives in Jesus “…because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” (1 John 4:4 NIV)
Photo by Kevin Noble on Unsplash
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