“Dooley, before you sit down at this table, you go wash your face and hands,” Mrs. Josie ordered in no uncertain terms. Dooley went stomping out to the wash pan on the back porch. 
“I don't know who she thinks I am anyway,” he muttered under his breath.   “What did you say,” his mother asked sharply?  “I said yes mama, they are starting to stink anyway,”  he answered.   
After a few more seconds of muttering to himself  he came back into the kitchen.  His mother gave him a quick inspection and sent him right back out to the wash pan.  “Would you look at that rusty neck and dirty face,” she said.  
In all fairness to cousin Dooley, he did make an effort to do just that.  He walled his eyes around in their sockets as best he could but just couldn't see his rusty neck no matter how hard he tried, in fact he had never been able to look at his neck.  He actually couldn't see most of his face either.  He could see a little bit of his nose and there did seem to be something dripping from the end of it.  He wiped it off quickly with the back of his hand.   He dipped his hands in the wash pan, shook most of the water off and went back inside wiping his hands on his pants legs. 
“Did you wash your face?”she asked. “Aw Mama, ain't no part of my face gonna touch my food anyway except my lips, so I wiped them off good and really scoured my nose and hands with soap and water,”  he lied.  
She  had heard him lie before and told him he wouldn't get a bite of supper until he did what she told him to do.  
Hunger will drive a man to do lots of things he wouldn't normally do, so he stomped out again, convinced that it had to be done before he was allowed to eat his supper. 
All that washing and scrubbing had made him really hungry, so he ate a good portion of everything. He even looked at the green beans a moment before passing on them.  Green beans were just a little to green for his taste. “Don't like them,” he announced, even though no one knew for sure if he had ever tasted them before. Unless it was in a time of near starvation, which he often declared to be close at hand. 
“Cleanliness is next to godliness,” his mother declared, but Dooley wasn't feeling especially godly that day anyway. I think he was always thankful for his food except on the days they had turnip greens, but he was not widely known as a boy who turned thanks at the eating table.  
Every one of us have a tendency to become dirtied by the things of the world.  No wash pan will cleanse us from that kind of filth. Pontus Pilate  tried that long ago  (read Matthew 27:24), just before Jesus went to the cross to die for our sins.  Are you washed in His blood?