Would You Clean the Shower Drain?

You know that sinking feeling you get when you're showering and the water starts backing up and forms a mirky pool around your feet and you know you have to pop the little drain cover off and wrangle all the scum that's clogging the drain?  It makes your stomach turn but you plunge that coathanger into the dark abyss and fish out the slimy clot of hair, toe jam, bacteria, soap scum, and other stuff you don't want to imagine.

There is pretty much nothing worse than unclogging the shower drain.  It makes soiled diapers seem as benign as a therapeutic mud pack.

When Romans 12:16 says that we should not be haughty, but associate with the lowly, the Greek word for "lowly" is ambiguous.  It could mean lowly people or tasks.  It doesn't really matter which way it is because both fit the Christian life.  If it is about lowly people, then we are not to snub outcasts and misfits; if it is about menial tasks, then we should be willing to serve in any capacity.

No person and no job is below the Christian.

And here's why: Jesus, the glorious Son of God, humbled himself by becoming a man, then allowed himself to be humiliated by dying a criminal's death--while suffering the wrath of God for us.  Paul the Apostle said in the book of Philippians that we should have the same mindset.  Well, of course!  Jesus is our Master and our example.

If he was willing to submit to such horrible suffering and humiliation, we should be willing to unclog the drain, clean up puke in Sunday School, or enter into the messed up lives of people and help them.  So brace yourself, reach down into the putrid shower drain of life, pull up all that slime, let it soil your dainty hands and creep up under your pristine fingernails.

Allow no person or job to be below you.  Take Jesus' cue and be willing to abase yourself for the gospel, to please God, to be like our Lord.