It’s everywhere. It sticks to your hands in the garden, and clings tightly to your shoes until the moment you step inside, where it promptly falls onto the just-cleaned floor. It stains the knees and elbows of children’s clothes, collects on the sides of cars, and turns into a sloppy mess in the rain. Dirt.
Where I live, the dirt is usually hidden beneath a blanket of growing life. The soil is good in Ireland, and it stays well-watered, so it sprouts with a hundred thousand shades of green and fills with a million tangled roots of all sizes and varieties. When I look out at our garden, or a forest, or the green fields around our village, my attention is drawn to the life that blooms and grows above the ground. I hardly ever think of the ground itself—unless the dirt is causing me problems by collecting where I don’t want it, or I’m using it to plant something new in the garden. Otherwise, dirt is easy to ignore. Even though it’s everywhere, it’s mostly out of sight, and not nearly as impressive as the things that grow out of it. It’s just dirt.
It’s just dirt. It’s just what keeps our world alive. Without it, the forests would die, the crops would die, the animals would die, and we would join them. Look more closely, and you’ll discover that the dirt under our feet is a never-ending gift of God’s generous genius. It catches rainwater, slowing its flow and preventing constant flash-floods. It filters pollutants out of the water table, and retains moisture for the plants to draw on. When the abundant life above it dies, the soil receives its death and breaks down its nutrients into usable forms for the next generation of growth. It also stores and releases gasses, helping to regulate them, while providing a habitat for countless kinds of life—not only the plants but also animals that dig and worms and insects that burrow and did you know that even a single teaspoon of soil can contain a billion bacteria? Dirt is not just a nuisance on your children’s shoes. It is the foundation of our world’s life, and as silent as it may seem, it is a hive of constant activity—activity that is essential for our continued existence.
Don’t ever look down on the dirt. It holds the roots of our lives, and our history. It is the very substance God used to craft the first man, breathing his own life into “the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7) to create a living, loving image of himself (Genesis 1:27). As a potter shapes the clay, so God shaped the dirt, and the result was you and me and everyone who has ever lived. Our Creator can take what is lowly and overlooked, what we wash from our hands and bodies because it’s filthy with accumulating death and waste, and he can turn that dirt into the perfect material to carry his life. He does it all the time. He does it all over the world. And he does it with his children.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” – 2 Corinthians 4:7
We are the jars, literally shaped from the clay. Is it humbling to remember that you are made of clay? Clay is just dirt. Just dirt that carries God’s life, displaying the generous genius and care and power of our glorious Creator. Don’t ever look down on the dirt.
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