The Floor She Scrubbed At Two

By two in the morning Delia had done the grout.

She had started at eleven with the dishes, which was reasonable, and there is nothing in the world wrong with a woman doing her dishes at eleven at night. Then the counter. Then under the toaster, which had not been under in a while. Then the front of the cupboards, one door at a time, with a cloth she kept rinsing out and wringing until her knuckles ached.

By midnight the oven racks were standing up in the bathtub.

By one she had the fridge shelves out on the drainer and was going along the rubber seal of the door with a cotton bud, and she could not have told you why the rubber seal of a fridge door mattered at one in the morning, and it did not matter, and she kept going.

By two she was on the floor with an old toothbrush, doing the grout between the tiles. The strip light over the stove buzzed. The radiator ticked as it cooled. The whole room smelled of bleach so strongly that her eyes were running, and she told herself it was the bleach.

Here is the thing she was not cleaning.

There is a thing. You know the shape of it even though you do not know hers, because everybody who has ever been on a kitchen floor at two in the morning was down there for the same reason: there is one thing, and it cannot be reached, and the tiles can.

So she went along the grout line, an inch at a time, in a house where every single surface was now cleaner than it had been in four years, and the thing sat exactly where it had been sitting since before the dishes.

At some point she stopped. Not because she finished. Because there was nothing left within arm's reach.

She sat back on her heels in the middle of a spotless kitchen with a toothbrush in her hand, and the sentence came up out of her like something surfacing.

"I cannot get at it."

Around half past four the light started coming up gray at the window, so she opened the back door for the air.

It had rained in the night. She had not even known. The yard was shining, the step was dark and wet, and the gutter above the door had a slow steady run coming off one corner, splashing into the drain.

Delia stood in the doorway in her socks. Then she put her hand out into the water coming off the gutter and just held it there.

She was not washing anything. There was nothing left on her hands to wash. She stood there with cold water running over her fingers and no idea why it undid her, and the noise she made was not a tidy one.

Beloved, stand in that doorway with me a minute. You have had a two in the morning. Maybe yours was a floor, maybe it was a car you valeted, maybe it was every email in an inbox at an hour when nobody sends emails. Come and look at what the water was actually for.

The old washings were built to repeat, and that was the point

On the third day of the world, God gathered the waters into one place and called them Seas, and He looked at the gathering of water and called it good. Water was His idea before it was ever anybody's instrument. Keep that in your pocket, because it changes what follows.

When His people were given the washings, in Leviticus and in Numbers, the striking thing about them is not how strict they were. It is how often they came back around. Wash, and be clean until evening. Wash, and come back on the seventh day and wash again. On and on, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

That was not a design flaw. That was the design.

A washing that has to be repeated is a washing that is telling you something about itself. It is honest. It says: I can get the outside, I can get today, and I cannot reach the thing you actually mean. Something else has to come.

And then, right through the middle of the prophets, that something else was promised out loud.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.Ezekiel 36:25

Read the hands in that verse. I will sprinkle. Not you will scrub harder. The water is poured, and the One pouring it is the One who made the seas on the third day.

So hear this in the tense it is written in. You are not the one who has to produce the clean water, and you never were. Ezekiel 36:25 was on the page centuries before your kitchen had tiles in it, and the same Spirit who put that promise into Scripture is the one holding it open in front of your eyes right now.

Then the promise walked down to a river.

Not a basin. A river. And not just any river: the Jordan, the water a whole nation had once walked across on dry ground to get out of the wilderness and into the land they had been promised. That river has a memory. It is not where Israel washed. It is where Israel crossed.

So when people came out to John at the Jordan, they were standing in water that had a crossing written into it, and what happened there was never advertised as an improved wash. Something was ending on one bank and something else was beginning on the other.

Which brings us to a blind man on a street called Straight, three days without food, with a name he had made terrible.

And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.Acts 22:16

Calling on the name of the Lord. There is the working part. The washing away is fastened to a name, not to an effort, and the man being spoken to had nothing whatever to offer except that he had stopped.

Peter said the same thing on the first day it was ever preached: turn, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. A gift. Given, on a day, in a name.

So take it as the finished thing it is. You have not been failing to get clean; you have been trying to do with a cloth what was only ever done by a crossing. It is already done in Him, His word says it is fastened to His name and not to your hands. His Spirit is doing the carrying while you sit there.

And if that is stirring in you as you read, do not sort it out alone and do not improvise anything. Find someone. Find a believer you trust, or a pastor, and tell them plainly that you want to talk about being baptized, and let them walk you through it. That is the whole instruction and I am stopping there on purpose.