Refinishing floors and the nature of sin

I spent most of last week on my hands and knees.

After pulling up all the carpet in my house, we found some serious staining on the hardwood floors. Somebody in the 50 year history of this house had a dog. Somebody in that 50 year history did not let his or her dog out often enough. Somebody's dog peed all over the carpet. It sank through to the floors and stained and damaged the boards. There were also patterns of water damage in the traffic patterns all throughout the house. Not as dramatic of an event as the dog version, but over the 50 year history of this house, people walked in and out of the doors with wet shoes. Other people tried to clean up the wet-shoes-on-carpet-mess by steam-cleaning, but only drove the moisture deeper into the carpet, and from there into the wood floor below. It was a mess.

Anyway, as I spent the week on my hands and knees pulling out staples and sanding damaged wood and painting over the damage, I thought about that dog and about those people and I thought about the nature of sin.

The way I see it, some sin is like a dog peeing on a floor. It's an event. It's something that you probably notice. It's obvious and obviously not a good thing. Other sin is more like the traffic patterns. You can't point back to one storm or one day or one set of muddy boots. It just builds up slowly until you can see the tracks over all those areas you habitually travel.

And just like sin, whether the stains came suddenly or gradually, covering it up was not a viable answer. That's what all the people before me in this house did. They saw the mess, and instead of cleaning the floors, they replaced the carpet. They just hid it and hoped nobody would notice.

Let me tell you from personal experience (both with sin and carpet removal): covering it up does not make it go away. Before we pulled up the carpet, the house had a smell. It didn't stink outright, but I'd find myself walking through a door or kneeling down to get something and thinking "What IS that?" There was an odor of decay and mildew. As soon as we pulled up the carpet, it became obvious what it was we had been smelling, but if we hadn't looked underneath, we probably would have just kept opening windows and lighting candles and hoping that we could banish the smell when all along it was coming from under our feet.

The floors are all refinished now: truly beautiful and truly clean. I want them to be a reminder to me--covering it up doesn't get rid of it.