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Corn Starched Clothes

by Jerry Ousley  
5/31/2008 / Christian Living

So far in my life I've been in four different foundries. Because of the nature of the business, foundries are normally extremely hot and extremely dirty. If you stop and think about all the heat it takes to melt metal then it stands to reason that they are going to be hot. Because of the process a foundry is naturally very dirty. All four of the foundries I've been in were no exception, all but one. I don't know how they kept it so clean but I was in a foundry in Etowah, Tennessee taking a tour and walked through with white tennis shoes on. Amazingly when I finished the tour my tennis shoes were still white!

Three of the four foundries I was in were related to the job I was doing at the time. But one of them was actually my place of employment. I was in college and for two summers worked in a foundry to earn college money. The foundry always shut down for two weeks during the middle of July for maintenance. That was generally when workers took their vacation if they had vacation time coming. If not they either took it off without pay or they volunteered to work. Being only part-time I had no vacation days. I couldn't afford two whole weeks without pay so I volunteered to work. The foundry didn't pour metal during that time but cleaned and did maintenance on the machinery. I got stuck with a lot of odd-jobs.

One day they put me to unloading fifty-pound bags of corn starch. I guess they used it somehow in making cores for the castings. It was hot. It was in the middle of July and was probably in excess of ninety degrees outside. It was probably a hundred degrees or more in the foundry. But these bags were on a rail car. That metal car was probably ten to fifteen degrees or better higher than in the foundry. Carrying fifty pound sacks of corn starch off that rail car, and stacking it on skids in the foundry was hard and hot work. I began to sweat to say the least. My clothes were wringing wet with sweat. I don't know if some of those bags of corn starch had burst or if they just naturally leaked, but corn starch was everywhere. It was lying on the floor of the rail car; it was all over the bags and by moving those bags around it was even floating in the air. It began mixing with the sweat in my clothes. You've heard the saying, "You could stand those pants in the corner?" Well, that day I literally fulfilled that statement. By the time I got home from work, my clothes were so stiff you really could stand them up in the corner. Not just my pants but my shirt and socks as well. We could have put them together and stood them up in the garden as a scare-crow without having to put a stake in the ground to hold them up! They were dirty, soiled and full of corn starch. They definitely needed to be washed.

What kind of clothes do you like? Our clothing can make a statement about who we are. For instance many jobs require a uniform that tells others that they are a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, a police officer or a soldier. Many factories require uniforms identifying those who work there.

Whatever kind of clothing we wear it gets dirty, dingy and smelly after a while. We've got to wash those clothes. Did you know that the Bible talks about clothes? Isaiah 61:10 speaks of the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness. These are the garments given us by God for our soul once we come to Him. They are spiritual garments that tell who we are and who we are associated with. Our spiritual clothing without coming to the Lord is soiled, dingy and smelly. They desperately need to be changed.

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.

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