The other day, my neighbor, Timothy, invited me over for lunch. One of his children had gifted him with a bucketful of crawfish, and did I care for some, he wanted to know.
Crawfish? Me? I’m not a seafood fan, preferring dead cow as my choice of edible flesh.
Actually, crawfish (or crayfish, or crawdads), are freshwater crustaceans. But who cares? They still look gross.
With the warmer water temperatures, millions of these grotesque creatures awaken in muddy swamps and marshes, and begin offering themselves to humans for consumption—an obligatory rite-of-spring celebration in the southeastern US.
Scaly monsters with disproportionate and asymmetric claws, beady eyes, creepy antennae, and seemingly impenetrable armor. No wonder they’re also called mudbugs.
Gross!
But not for some. They think that this miniature Godzilla-like creature easily rivals its heftier saltwater sibling, the Atlantic lobster. Yeah, right! (Not that I care for this last specimen of flesh either, but, hey, “Atlantic lobster” at least sounds more respectable!)
Notice the huge pile of remains of deceased Procambarus clarkii (red swamp crawfish) piled on Timothy’s side of the table! Feeding frenzy.
And notice my share.
If you wondered about the newspaper, that is the prescribed method of eating these things. As one expert and crawfish gourmand recommended: “Take a few hundred pounds of live crawfish, plunge them into seasoned boiling water, spill whole mess onto newspaper-covered table. Pick up a steaming crawfish and rip it into two pieces—cephalothorax and tail. Strip shell from tail end, bite off exposed meat, and inhale deeply through the head cavity. Take long quaff of fizzy beer, then throw shell onto towering mountain of empties. Repeat as needed.”
Gross.
The amount of meat per crawfish is miniscule, hence aficionados, like aforementioned neighbor of mine, go for high volume.
Gross.
If you’ve seen a crawfish boil, you might have noticed how that mixture of reddish crustaceans, copious cayenne, and other stuff uncannily and eerily looks like a pot of boiling blood.
Gross.
All this to say that I took one tiny bite and just about gave up the ghost. Not my man, Timothy. He kept on going. Love doth indeed cover grossness!
He spoke and said to those
who were standing before him, saying,
“Remove the filthy garments from him.”
Zechariah 3:4a
That’s God talking about Israel’s high priest, Joshua, whose “filthy garments” represent the sin of the nation, and by extension the sin of human kind. And “filth”? It literally means human excrement!
Gross!
Even the seemingly righteous deeds we perform are like an unclean garment.
For all of us have become
like one who is unclean,
And all our righteous deeds
are like a unclean garment;
And all of us wither like a leaf,
And our iniquities, like the wind,
take us away.
Isaiah 64:6
For God is so holy, so absolutely, totally, perfectly holy, that he cannot even look upon sin.
Your eyes are too pure to approve evil,
And You can not look on wickedness with favor.
Habakkuk 1:13
Look, now, at what God does to Joshua and his “filthy garment.”
Again He said to him,
“See, I have taken your iniquity
away from you and will
clothe you with festal robes.”
Zechariah 3:4b
Filthy garments to festal robes.
Love does cover grossness!
But God demonstrates
His own love toward us, in that
while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8
Someone else paid for my grossness and gave me His garments.
He who overcomes
will thus be clothed
in white garments.
Revelation 3:5
Praise God!
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