The Sleeping Bag I Never Washed

When I met my wife, I was living in a 1981 brown Volkswagen Vanagon. The kind with

the roof that pops up like a tent. There was a little fridge that ran on propane, a two-

burner stovetop, and one pot. Every single day of my life, that pot held chunky soup.

There’s no sink in a Volkswagen van, so I had a system for washing that pot. My

system was a paper towel. I’d wipe it out, put it back in the cupboard, and get on with

my day like a man who had solved something.

I thought I had the greatest life going. I figured everybody who drove by and saw me

sitting there in a lawn chair was quietly jealous.

The other thing I owned that I was proud of was my sleeping bag. It was a Kluane,

850 fill down, handmade by a little lady old named Lucy who was famous for them. It

cost me over $800, and back then, that was a number you didn’t tell your mother. It

looked like a quilt my grandma threw over the couch, but it was built to keep a man alive on Mount Everest.

Cara was curious about the van, so she climbed in. And she stopped.

There’s a certain smell a man produces when he lives alone in a small sealed

container for a long time. It was not one smell. It was a committee. And here’s the part I

wouldn’t understand for years — I couldn’t smell any of it. Not one bit. My nose had

signed a treaty with that van.

Cara’s nose had not signed anything.

She noticed the bag, picked up the end of it, lifted it to her face, and smelled it. Then

she looked at me in shock.

“When is the last time you washed this thing?”

And I said, “Washed it?”

I wasn’t being funny. I was genuinely confused. Sheets are cotton, and cotton gets

washed. This was nylon. It’s a technical fabric. You don’t wash a tent. You don’t wash a

canoe. Why would you wash a sleeping bag?

She was mortified. And then, being who she is, she didn’t lecture me. She just took it

away and washed it.

I will never forget the first night I crawled back into that bag. The down had come

back to life with twice the loft it had before, puffed up thick and warm like the day I

bought it. It was soft against my skin in a way I had no memory of. And the smell of it!

Clean and warm and light. It took me somewhere. It felt like being a kid at my

grandmother’s house.

And I had no idea it had gotten dirty.

Not because I was lying to myself. Because it happened one night at a time. One

camp at a time. There was never a morning where I woke up and said, “Well, today it

crossed the line.” It got filthy so slowly that filthy became normal, and normal became

invisible. I wasn’t tolerating the dirt. I had stopped being able to detect it.

I forgot what clean felt like, so I never once missed it.

Now let me tell you why that story has preached to me for thirty years.

People ask me all the time, and it’s an honest question, so I take it as one. Why do I need to give my life to Christ? Why do I need my sins washed away? I’m fine. I’m a good person.

And I never quite know how to answer, because the honest answer is: you can’t

smell it!

It came on you the same way it came on my sleeping bag. Nobody wakes up one

morning and decides to be heavy. It arrives one night at a time.

It’s the thing that happened to you when you were 7 years old. It’s the thing you did

at 19 that you’ve never said out loud to another human being, and you’ve carried it so

long you quit calling it a weight and started calling it your personality. It’s the name you

can’t hear without your stomach going tight. It's the grudge you take out and polish every time things get quiet. It’s the anger that comes out over something small at a size that scares even you, and afterward you tell yourself, that’s just how I am.

Here’s how I know you know what I’m talking about. You pull into your own

driveway and you don’t get out. You shut the truck off and you sit there in the dark with

the keys in your hand, because you need a minute before you go in and be who you’re

supposed to be in there.

And you don’t feel dirty. That’s the part I want you to hear me on. You feel normal.

You’ve never been anything else, so you have nothing to compare it to.

You’re not a bad person, and I’m not calling you one. You’re amazing. You’re like an

$800 sleeping bag… that’s never been washed.

And there is a clean you have never felt.

When Jesus Christ washes a person’s sins away, it isn’t a religious ceremony and it isn’t turning over a new leaf. It’s a transformation.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things

passed away; behold, new things have come.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17

The shame lifts. And I don’t mean you talk yourself out of it — I mean you go looking for it one day and it isn’t where you left it. You can say the name out loud and there’s no knot. You can forgive the person you swore you never would, and it costs you nothing, because you’re not paying the interest on that debt anymore.

And one day you’ll pull into your driveway and just get out of the truck. First time in

years. You won’t even notice you did it.

You can have it, but you cannot earn it. That’s the scandal of the thing. Jesus went to

a cross and paid for every last bit of it, and He is not selling it back to you.

“Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved.” — Romans 10:13

Whoever. You’re a whoever, aren’t you?

If you can’t remember a time when you called on Him and asked Him to save you,

you can do that right now, where you’re sitting. Not when you get cleaned up first —

that’s backwards. That’s a man refusing to go to the doctor until he feels better. Simply

pray, and say:

Jesus, I need You. I’ve sinned, and I can’t save myself. Thank You for dying for me and rising again. Please forgive me and wash my sins away. Give me a new heart and fill me with Your Holy Spirit. Today I choose to follow You. I don’t own myself anymore. You are my Savior and my Lord. Amen.

He is not trying to ruin your fun.

He’s trying to get you out of the van long enough to smell it. He’s trying to hand you

back to yourself, clean, and let you find out that the life you’ve been defending was never

the good one.

Cara washed my sleeping bag because she loved me too much to let me keep living

like that.

Jesus is standing at your van door with the same look on His face. Let Him take it.

You have no idea how good you’re about to feel.