Washed White as Snow

Today's prayer group at school was a culmination of thoughts/scripture over the last week.  At church last week, the sermon series topic was the creation story.  There were lots of great insights for me, but I'll only delve into that which is relevant here with the prayer group.   The main thing I pulled away from the sermon was that ALL of creation was created to give HIM all the glory.  It's purpose was simply for God to be glorified. Our pastor challenged us to choose from a short list something that we wanted to focus on this week in our spiritual walk.  I chose to focus my prayer time on praising God for His creation and seeking to glorify Him in that.  Fast forward to Tuesday when the snow began.  During my prayer time on my drive to school, I was praising God for the beauty of the snow as it was falling all around me...The scripture from Isaiah 1:18a popped in my head. '"Come now, let's settle this," says the Lord. "Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow."'  This snow was an awesome reminder to me of God's grace pouring over me and cleansing my ugly sin white as snow. Ahhhh...what a feeling and image in my mind.  Then this morning on my drive, as I'm contemplating this scripture again in preparation for prayer time with my teacher friends, it occurred to me how ugly the road snow was...it was dirty, dingy, slushy and gross looking...Hmmmm...so God took my mind on a little tangent from my original message of being cleansed like snow...We are cleansed each time we ask forgiveness and God starts over with us with a pure white slate...then what happens?  We yucky it up with more sins, more slip-ups, more attention away from Him...essentially we become dirty, dingy, and gross-looking on the inside again just like that snow on the road.  But what is so awesome is that it was snowing again on my drive.  You guessed it, covering up the dirty-ness and making it white again.  Isn't that what He does with us?  He continually replenishes the forgiveness to turn us white as snow.  This image has been such a blessing to me this week...I've had to be "snowed upon" many times.  Thank you Jesus for being cleansed and for the creation that smacked me with this revelation!