Dusty, Sucky, or Good?

My husband had a dust buster when we got married. It has been well-used. Its poor, rechargeable battery, however, has seen many a better day. It has a battery life of about 60 seconds. With the flick of the power switch, it starts with enthusiasm and gusto, but within about 5 seconds it begins its descent into eventual inoperability. It goes quickly downhill from that point. The suction level rapidly descends from near, "I can suck up pennies - reminiscent of the infomercial that put me in your hands" speed to "I'm not sure I can suck up that (wheeze-cough)... empty (wheeze-cough)... air," speed. It has ceased to be useful to me, because our family seems incapable of producing the 60 seconds or less mess anymore. It has inspired me to attempt a speed clean on a few occasions, but it usually just ends up in frustration. It has ceased to be good, but like so many of those things that we keep around way past their prime, we keep it. It has almost come to the point of deserving a nickname. Perhaps, since we killed Sucky, the algae eater we got for our small fish tank, we could use that name for the dust buster. Heaven knows you can't have two Suckies in the house at once, because that could lead to some confusion in which an algae eater might be pulled out of his tank and told to suck up cheerios off the living room carpeting. Pretty soon, we'll just be able to call it Dusty, since that's what it is most of the time, because it's useless.

I like to organize my groceries on the checkout belt at Walmart and cross my fingers that the cashier I choose will actually recognize that my groceries are somewhat organized into categories and put them in the bags that way. I attempt to choose, based on some vague specifications, the type of cashier that might do this. Inevitably, I end up grimacing politely while watching him/her stuff a tube of toothpaste in a bag with cottage cheese, batteries, and underwear. The search for the good cashier... always a challenge.

The theme, maybe not so obviously here, is goodness. There are so many ways to define it, but I think maybe one eclipses all others. In Exodus 33, Moses has an encounter with God described here:

¹⁸Then Moses said, "I pray You, show me Your glory!"

¹⁹And He said, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion."

²⁰But He said, "You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!"

²¹Then the LORD said, "Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock;

²²and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by.

²³"Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen."

This exchange has long intrigued me, because it's the only case I can think of in which God is physically seen by man in any way other than as a pillar of fire or a cloud. What interests me about it is that God gave Moses what he wanted - and tenderly protected him from seeing all of Himself - which would have surely killed him. What strikes me this evening, as I think about goodness is that is how God described His physical appearance to Moses... "I will make all my goodness pass before you..." He describes it again by using the word glory. The only thing we can see if we look at Him - the only thing we could see if He was physically visible to us - is good.

We have trivialized goodness, defining it by our own standard of good and bad, happy and sad, right and wrong. We define it by our circumstances or by our experiences. We have given it our own spin and, like so many things, made into something "bite-sized"... something small and manageable... when it was never meant to be. We were never meant to even grasp good, lest it be the very thing that killed us. His goodness is seen in everything He made - all creation - even us. He saw His creation, before the fall of man, and "saw that it was good". All of these things carry, to this day, a glimpse of the whole of goodness, but not even the most majestic sight imaginable in creation can come close to comparing with even an ounce of the good that is, by definition, God.

In the same verses above, God proclaims, "and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion." He reminds Moses of the fact that His goodness is not separate from His sovereignty and that his compassion and graciousness (or the sometimes seeming lack thereof) is part of his whole goodness. This calls me to become better at working to define my daily encounters in different terms. Instead of defining God by my circumstances (if my circumstances are good, God must be good), I choose to think in the inverse - if my God is good, then my circumstances are part of His goodness toward me.

I wonder if this will make old dust busters, dead fish, and the fact that I can't use "the force" to mind control Walmart cashiers into doing my bidding easier to handle.