Maybe you already knew that, but I'm learning that. I have spent a lot of my life trying to avoid my own mess, which has necessarily meant avoiding other people's messes, too. If you keep things always on the surface, your mess isn't exposed and you don't have to deal with this person or that person's mess either.
It's convenient, really. It is also very, very unfulfilling. You never get to know anybody truly and nobody ever truly knows you. So a while back, I started digging a little deeper with folks. Excavating parts of myself that were normally kept under wraps. They followed in suit.
And they're messy. I'm messy. We're all really, really messy.
Sometimes, I hate it. It puts me face to face with the limitations of my being only human. It makes me feel painfully inadequate to get a phone call from a woman I love and to hear her fret over not being able to pay her light bill. I drive over there, knowing full well that I cannot pay her light bill for her, and all I can do is give her bus fare to get to the crisis ministry in our city. I listen to her heart, which is scared and frightened, and I have no words to soothe her, but I pray. It is messy. My mess entangled with her mess, my words entangled with her words, prayers to an unseen but very real God. We don't know how he'll clean up our messes, but he will.
So sometimes, I love the mess. It reeks of Jesus, of his redemption, of his glory. It is one chapter in a book that was finished 2,000 years ago, when death and sin were defeated. The mess, when you are reading it and living, is painful. And yet, there is hope.
We are messes, each of us.
We are also redeemed.
I think sometimes we just need to be reminded of how we are human and messy and faulty. So then God can remind us how he is glorious and beautiful and gracious.
I love how God does that.
