You know how sometimes you try to avoid something only to find that God won’t let it go and basically, He throws it in Your face so often that You have to give in albeit ever so reluctantly? Well, that’s how it’s been with me recently and mud. Yes, God just keeps throwing it at me!
It started when I looked into the origins of ‘February’ and found that it was known as ‘mud month’ – I suppose due to frequent rain and thawing snow. Then I read this again in a book by Sandi Toskvig. On the way to a preaching engagement yesterday we were warned of ‘Mud on the road’ and at a recent concert ‘The Hippopotamus Song’ featured – I can’t remember the last time I heard that.
I turned on my computer this morning to be bombarded by adverts for mud baths. Apparently, there are at least ten advantages of regularly partaking of these, as a result of both the mineral content and warmth they are: pain relieving, de-stressing, de-toxing, relaxing, skin softening, calming, cleansing, PH level balancing, improving blood circulation and they prepare your mind and body for action. Throughout time and in diverse cultures mud baths have been recognised as nature’s way to put things right. Cleopatra took them regularly.
So maybe I was on the right track as a child digging up the garden to make mud pies. Mud kitchens are a modern feature of many school playgrounds. It just seems a little topsy turvy that something ‘dirty’ can be so therapeutic.
However, didn’t God form humans out of mud? Jesus used mud on at least one occasion to cure a blind man (John 9) and ancient Jewish purity rituals often included covering oneself in mud, dust or ashes – Christians echo this in Ash Wednesday services. Psalm 40:2 speaks symbolically of restoration and salvation by being pulled out of the miry clay. So, in the Bible, mud symbolises transformation, renewal, restoration and salvation.
So, in ‘Mud month’ and the run up to Lent, let’s remember what God has done for us. You could go so far as to thank Him by having a mud bath/face pack, making a mud pie with the children or singing a chorus of ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud.’