Dry Cleaners

Growing up whenever I pictured Heaven I pictured this big man with his huge beard in a giant throne.  You all the angels flying around dressed in their white clothes. Everyone else walked around in their white suits perfectly cleaned without a spot on them. There would be tables full of food and in my eyes huge screen T.V.s playing football games all the time. Now, the thing that blew my mind is how everyone had such white suits. I mean can someone really have that clean of clothes.   This is how I came to understand Purgatory.

Now Purgatory is one of those things that people see that Catholics just made up and makes no sense at all. If you talk to a lot of Catholics they have no real way to explain purgatory. Well I am going to make an attempt at explaining it in the way that I see it.  When you get ready for a wedding or some large celebration you always wear your nicest clothes and make sure they are clean and spotless. I mean really do you want to be "that guy" with a salsa stain on your shirt. No! You would be highly embarrassed if you had that stain on your shirt at a wedding. Now, what is bigger than finally meeting with God. Nothing. So you want to make sure that you are nicely and clean. Now, the beauty about God is that he doesn't only see the clothes we are wearing or our physical features, but he sees how clean our soul is. Here comes purgatory.

Purgatory is like the dry cleaners that you take your suit to before a wedding.  You want everything to be the cleanest it can be before you go to the wedding and it is the same when you go into heaven. Purgatory cleans all the muck that we have in our heart just like the dry cleaners cleans our suits.  They make all of our clothes all nice and clean after we have made them all mucky over the years.  So for me that seems like the simplest way to understand Purgatory which is a topic that can be very difficult to understand.