White as snow

The other week, I did a thorough reorganizing of my closet because I become meticulously tidy when I can no longer stand being a slob for weeks on end.

Everything has a designated place in my home, but from time to time, those things don't immediately make their way back to their spots.

When needing to get our apartment orderly-looking in a jiffy, I got into a bad habit of throwing loose things into my closet and just closing the door.  Everywhere else looked like a well-kept, tidy home, but I hid a piling secret in my closet.

After several mornings of tiptoeing and squeezing around the pile to find an outfit, I finally decided that enough is enough.

So I set to work one snowy day.

First on the pile.

Then going through each piece of clothing, deciding whether I needed it or not.  You know the drill.

There was refolding, color-coordinating, and bagging.

It took hours.  Partially because I stopped to take a nap.  And I would get sidetracked here and there (oh, look at this box of cards I found from my husband!  Then I would read them...)

When I was younger and would clean my room and organize my closet, my mom would inevitably come back to find me sidetracked, sitting on my floor hours into the process, looking sentimentally through my stuff.  It makes organizing go much slower.  But I don't know how else to be.

My husband asked what I was going to do with my wedding dress, which was tucked away in a box on a top shelf in my closet.  I guess it will just stay in this box until I die, I thought.

Well, strangely, the very next day, I got a message from fellow med school wife Deanna, a photographer looking to take pictures in the recent snowfall of anyone willing to don her wedding dress.

Hmmm....I thought.  It's been years...could I?  All my grading is done... I've been cooped in the house for 3 snowy days.  I'm bored.

So I did it.  It was just the right amount of spontaneity for me.

I spent way too much time trying to make my hair look good, only to create a funny cowlick in the back that wouldn't go away.  And when I did get outside, I didn't care what I looked like anymore, because my only thought was how I could keep my body temperature from plummeting.  It was much colder than I anticipated, but I gave her my word.  And I was already all dressed...so I posed the way she told me to (she was such a good director), and the shoot went on!

And now's the part where I post a shameless picture of myself in my wedding dress.  I love how she captured the light through the veil.

To be honest, I just wanted to put it on again...to feel like a young and pretty bride...vanity of vanities....

But afterwards, it caused me to reflect on something much bigger.  After my fingers thawed out, and I was home again, on the couch, in my sweats, much less glamorous looking, I closed my eyes and thought of myself in that dress, in the snow. So white.  So clean looking. And I thought of myself as Christ's bride.  Once stained and hopeless, dead in my sin.  Now, white as snow, He says!

“Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow"
Isaiah 1:18

Such joy at the thought!  And then this song came to mind - What Can Wash Away My Sin?