˟

Parable of the Day: What Has Sin in Common with Dirty Laundry?


Dirty laundry needs to be washed sooner or later. You can dump the dirty clothes into a huge vat to postpone the unpleasant moment when you have to wash that huge pile. The problem is that over time the dirt penetrates deeper into the fabric, and it becomes harder to rub it off. You may have to boil the laundry, burn your fingers and rub skin off your palms, and rub, rub, rub it as hard as you can… Many days, many years. Imagine how many dirty shirts can one accumulate in her lifetime? Alternatively, you can do the laundry as soon as your clothes become dirty. While the spots are still new, you can wash them away with water. Other spots will require soap. The deepest blemishes will require caustic alkali, which irritates your eyes. Every laundress will tell you that grease and blood are the most difficult kinds of dirt to wash. Our sins and bad actions are our dirty laundry, and each of us is his own laundress. We have a unique opportunity — great in some ways and bitter in other ways — not to accumulate our sins throughout our entire lives, until the very last moment when our actions will be judged, but to start compensating for them during our earthly lives, i.e., during the time when it is still possible to change something. It is a proper and reasonable way to go, so we shouldn’t be surprised when each white stripe in our lives is followed by a black one: imagine what blackness would await us after absolute whiteness?


Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

CONVERSATION