Why Cleaning Poo is Supernatural

I was talking to my man Adrian on Saturday night, just after we’d finished the first big push to get our new church building ready for Easter in Van Buren, Missouri.

We had spent the day dealing with some “demonic odors.” I’m talking smells that felt like they were piped in straight from the pits of hell. We had a crew of about forty people in there, scrubbing floors and cleaning up some of the nastiest shisel you can imagine. Nobody was getting paid. We didn’t have any hype music playing. We were just in the muck.

And Adrian looks at me with a grin on his face and says, “Man, today was fun.”

Think about that for a second. In the “sane” world, that sentence doesn’t compute. Nobody calls their buddies on a Friday night and says, “Hey, you want to come over and help me clean up some sewage? It’ll be a blast.” That’s not how the world works. But that is exactly how the Kingdom works.

The Kingdom Doesn’t Compute

Most of us spend our lives trying to avoid the “nasty stuff.”

We’ve been sold a lie that the Christian life is about “sugar cookies and rainbows.” We think that if we follow Jesus, we’ll eventually reach a place where we don’t have to get our hands dirty anymore. We treat the church like a country club where we pay dues to be served, rather than a workshop where we show up to labor.

The “fun” Adrian experienced wasn’t about the task; it was about the habitat.

When you release your grip on your own comfort and you plant your life in something bigger than yourself, God does something supernatural to your spirit. He reverses the clock. He takes a job that should be miserable and turns it into a moment of restoration. This is what faithful tending actually looks like: finding purpose in the quiet, unglamorous spaces.

Kingdom life doesn’t compute with worldly logic because the Kingdom isn’t powered by “fair wages”; it’s powered by a Rescue. When you realize you’ve been pulled out of the muck yourself, scrubbing a floor for the Hero who saved you doesn’t feel like a chore. It feels like a privilege.

Change Your Alignment

If you’re waking up this Wednesday feeling drained, bored, or resentful, you might be living in the wrong camp.

You’re likely focused on the surface. You see a building, or a job, or a mess that needs to be cleaned. But when you give your heart to God, he repurposes the hardware. He takes the “criminal punishment” of the cross and turns it into a tool of deliverance. He can take your energy and your time and turn them into a spiritual orchard; but only if you stop being a spectator.

Stop trying to “salvage” your comfort. Get in the muck.

Your Mission This Week: Identify one “nasty” task in your life or in this community that you’ve been avoiding because it’s beneath you or too exhausting. Stop complaining about it. Stop waiting for someone else to do it.

Instead, go do it with the same “mental aggression” we had on Saturday. Do it as an act of worship to the one who rescued your heart from a much deeper pit.

Open your mouth and declare the victory while you work. See if you don’t find yourself grinning like Adrian by the time you’re done.

See you Sunday,

Pastor Jeremy