He Heals the Wounds of Every Heart
And then there was Mold…
November 6, 2020
For about a month I walked into the laundry room and smelled something funny. Musty ish… kind of. I opened the window and thought, “It must just be the plants I have on the window sill…” Right?
Not so much. Last week I did a load of laundry and it came out smelling disgusting and moldy! Finally I clued in! The mold smell was coming from the front loading washing machine. I got on my progressive glasses so I could see better, turned on my flashlight (yeah…I’m getting old…) and stuck my head in the machine examining everywhere. There was a load of disgusting mold stuck in the rubber part of the machine all around behind the creases that I folded back. Gross. I got a wet rag and started scrubbing but the smell would not go away. Now what? The thoughts were circularly running through my head in accusatory fashion. “Glen would have never let this happen. Glen would know what to do! Look what you’ve done. Here you are a grown woman and you let this much mold grow in your washing machine…”
Not good thoughts. Who knows if Glen would have caught it or not? He may have or he may not have caught that bit of mold growing and becoming disgusting and spreading its way to my clothes. I sat back feeling sick from the mold smell. Then the light bulb came on and I called Coast Appliances where the machine was bought. After explaining the mold problem the lady on the phone said, “Oh yes, that’s a common problem. You’re supposed to use a product called “Affresh” once a month to clean the machine from any mold build up, leave the door open (at least I had been doing that part), and wipe it dry.”
“Hmm…” I mumbled into the phone. “That would have been good to know…” I purposefully left my sentence unfinished so I wouldn’t completely offend the poor woman but in my head I finished with, “good to know when you buy the machine! Not after you have the mold problem that has now spread to your clothes!”
I messaged my son to buy the product and we ran the machine on “self-clean” for four plus hours. Still moldy. So I ran it for two more four-hour cycles and the mold issue, after more scrubbing, was not smelly anymore. The mold stains however, are still there and will not go away. I washed my clothes four times for the mold smell to leave. Sigh…Mold is not a good thing. Mold for a Lyme infected person is even worse as the Lyme symptoms get worse. I guess now that it’s taken care of I can detox the mold and get better…at least that’s me trying to be positive!
Mold is a bit like the demonic in my opinion. The demonic, like mold, creeps up on you while you are unaware. You continue in your thinking, your way of being, but it sits on your shoulder and taunts you, even changing your thinking. It may be through the choice of media that you watch – violence, sexual, cultic, supernatural or otherwise inappropriate for our eyes and ears to hear. It may be through the acceptance of what have now become societal norms that just a few short years ago the Church was preaching against. I don’t think that the Word of God has changed…so I’m thinking that the mold has crept up on some of us unaware. The thing is, some of our laundry is starting to smell like mold already and, like me, we blame it on something else. It must be the plants… It’s in here somewhere but I’m not sure where… We don’t look hard enough to find the cause. Because of that we wander from the truth and wandering from the truth causes us to wander from God because God is truth and love. Then pride sets in. I can do it on my own. I can do it without God and without help from anyone. That’s when the mold really takes hold of a person and gets stuck in their mind creating brain fog, dizziness, and sickness. Mold sickness is no small thing. When mold takes over like that the only thing we can do to be free of the mold is to call out for help and humble ourselves of the pride we have been choosing through the mold build-up in our lives. It is then that God can freshen us with a few four-hour cycles of cleansing. Just like the product “Affresh” – except a whole lot better.
May the Lord bless us with a brain and spirit that is awake and alert to any mold build-up in our lives that will catch it and treat it with a good tablet of “Affresh” before we get sick! ☺