This bulletin is for someone who was once a member here and have lost their way. Or maybe it's really for each of us. It's up to you to decide that for yourself

I was playing around with mud this weekend, drywall mud. It's always strange to me that mud can be any color other than black or brown. When I went to Yellowstone this year, the "mud pots" there that bubbled and boiled out of the ground were all sorts of colors, mostly tan. It just doesn't seem right.

Drywall mud is white. Not shock white, but almost. I've heard it called "clean mud" before, and I reckon that aptly describes it. I know it doesn't have any organic stuff in it; it's almost pure gypsum (which is white). Gypsum is strange stuff all on its own. On a different family vacation from the one this year, we once went to White Sands, NM. White sands is, well, not really "sand" at all, but gypsum dust that has piled up over time into a huge area of dunes. Mud that's not muddy, and sand that's not sandy. No wonder it's so confusing to me!

In White Sands, NM, the sand is "clean sand". It doesn't really stick to you like regular sand. One can be buried up to their neck in it, climb out, and not have a grain left sticking to you. That's pretty clean!

Drywall mud doesn't taste like much, either. A long time ago I used to work with a couple of guys, Vinny (the violent) and Scooter. Scooter used to tease Vinny to death, which was kind of a shock. Vinny was a `Nam vet, who went there because the choice was either enlist or serve hard time for bashing someone over the head. To show you that Vinny was often just plain mean, one time Scooter and I were up on a steel scaffolding about 3 sections up and Vinny was cutting the drywall sheets and handing them up to us. All of a sudden we both got shocked! We looked down at Vinny who immediately said "I didn't do it!" and we said "Do what, Vinny?" because we had him and we knew it. It turned out he was shorting one of the extension cords with his saw against the scaffold!

In any case, Scooter and Vinny would play some pretty serious practical jokes on each other. One time Scooter turned Vinny's truck mirrors around backwards, and Vinny got him back by unlocking Scooter's hubs on a very snowy and slippery day. I can't recall the exact thing Scooter did to Vinny this particular time, but Vinny got him good. Scooter brought his lunch from home every day, and he liked making his own sandwiches. At lunch time while he was eating it, Vinny laughed with Scooter about how smart he had been with his latest "joke." When Scooter was almost done with his lunch, Vinny said, "Hey, that looks like a tasty sandwich!" Well, Vinny had snuck into his bag and loaded up Scooter's sandwich with drywall mud!

The thing is, sometimes people say they can't be a Christian anymore because they are not good enough. That their lives, their souls, are so filthy they think a tanker truckload of Clorox can't make it white again. I wonder if Peter felt that way, when he'd denied Christ the third time. Maybe Judas did, too, once he realized what he had done. Have we done worse than them? Yet Peter found his way back from despair. Perhaps if we keep in mind that God can create clean mud and clean sand, maybe we can find in ourselves the ability to forgive. Because that's the hardest of all, isn't it? We can forgive others many things, even "artificial mayonnaise", but why is it so hard to forgive ourselves, and give ourselves a second chance at eternity" There are some things that even God doesn't have the power to do. Think about it.

Randy