Warts & All

I recently stopped by the pharmacy and in as quiet of a voice as I could get out, while not making eye contact so as to not fully show how ashamed I was, I apologized to the pharmacist for the gross nature of my visit and then proceeded to ask for medicine for a plantar wart.  A wart.  I have a plantar wart.  Ewww!  I tried to ignore it for a while thinking maybe it was just some sort of odd callous, but I have now been forced to come to terms with the fact that I do indeed have a plantar wart on the ball of my left foot.  (No worries, you can continue reading, I won't be including any pictures of warts)

This morning as I sat in church I thought about my wart.  I thought about how ridiculous it is that plantar warts grow inward.  The root is hidden deep inside your foot.  The "seed" (even that sounds gross) is in the very deepest heart of the wart, then comes the wart itself, and all of that is covered by layers of calloused skin.  Could this wart be any more difficult to get rid of?  Could it have possibly set itself up any better to be able to hold on for dear life?

So why was I thinking about my wart during church this morning?  I was thinking about it because I realized that I don't just have a wart on my foot, but I've got warts on my heart too.  The kind of warts that have deeply embedded themselves and then put up protective layer after protective layer to ensure that the wart lives on forever.  You may think this a gross analogy (and it is) but when it comes to some of the things that we have let implant and grow in our hearts, they are the grossest of all.

Too often we allow something small, let's call it a seed, to embed in our hearts.  Over time that seed begins to grow and produce habits in our lives, let's just call that the wart, the ugly part that we can see as a product of the seed.  And then simply because we are human, we begin to build walls around our ugly parts so that no one can see or even call us out on them, let's call that the callouses.  

When I spoke with the pharmacist the other day (bless his heart for not treating me like a filthy outcast with my talk of warts) he explained the process to me for removing the wart.  He explained that over a couple of weeks you have to use a specific type of acid and pumice stone to remove the layers of callous to start to expose the wart.  Only then can you work on getting the wart out as well. And you have to be careful to get the "seed" too or else this thing will grow back bigger and better and force you to start the process all over again in an even uglier and more painful fashion.

How many times have we identified something in our heart and begin the process of pulling down the walls so that we can expose and deal with the root, only to grow weary and stop?  Only to decide it was too much work or too painful?  Only to feel like we are the only ones that could ever have had such an ugly thing in our hearts and instead of being brave and asking for help we allow the shame to build yet another layer of callous on top of it all and convince us that it's ok to just let it stay there under the surface and somewhat out of sight?

The thing with plantar warts though is that they may not grow super ugly outward, but the longer we leave it, the bigger it grows inward.  The more healthy flesh it invades and the harder it will be to cut out.  Eventually it will become so large inside our foot that it will start to cause pain and eventually even discomfort in our daily tasks.  And though it may not be too visible on the outside we do still run the risk of infecting others with the virus that we are so casually walking around with.

Sadly the Lord is pointing out to me some warts on my heart lately.  Warts that I've left for too long.  Things that I've allowed to take deep root and setup their calloused walls to hide the ugly truth.  And whats even worse is the fact that I think I've infected some others with the ugly things that I've so casually been walking around with in my heart.  Luckily there is a Father that doesn't desire to leave us in ugly.  He doesn't desire to let is sit where we are.  But rather He desires to meet us where we are and help us to extract the ugly even out of our hearts so that our hearts can be soft and pliable in His Hands.  The extraction process may be painful, but the decision to leave things alone will eventually cause more pain that we can bear.  Thank you Father for not treating me like an outcast with my filthy talk of warts, but rather showing me and explaining in detail how to remove the calloused layers and expose the seed so that it can be dealt with.