The Mess

I’m a pretty calm person.  People notice this about me.  I can control my emotions, I’m pretty level headed in difficult situations, I take things as they come, I can roll with the punches.

But lately on the inside I’ve been freaking out a little and sometimes more than a little because I’m struggling with Jesus’ teaching to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39) and to care for people in need because Jesus told us “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). 

I’ve stepped way out of my comfort zone and I’ve really tried to live these words out.  I have poured my heart, my soul, and my energy into it.

I’ve loved and tried to care for people who are difficult to love and care for.  I’ve gone deep- I’ve tried to get to the root of the problems rather than just dealing with the surface struggles.  As soon as I think I have made some progress in helping someone or making the world a better place, things just get so much more complicated and the severity of the issue seems to amplify.

And all I see is more and more complex issues.  More pain.  More brokenness.

I took steps of faith, and now all I find myself with is a mess that I have no idea what to do with.  It’s the mess of a broken world.  It’s the mess of that comes with a broken person trying to love broken people.

So what do I do with disappointment?  With heartbreak?  With exhaustion?  With the temptation to give up?  What are we to do when things are just so overwhelming and success or progress seem to be completely out of the picture? 

What does it mean that I am trying to live how Jesus said we should live and it feels like Jesus is farther away from me as I see more and more brokenness?  Did God really intend for me to be in situations where my lack of experience and knowledge leave me feeling completely inadequate and I have no idea how the reign of God will ever be present?

All these questions and concerns are going around and around in my mind and it leaves me feeling more and more anxious, overwhelmed, and unsure about what it means to live as a Christian.

I remember a time when I was younger when my mom sent me to clean my bedroom.  After some time my mom came to check on my progress, and what she saw completely horrified her.  My bedroom may have been a little messy before, but now the president might have declared it a disaster area.  Clothes taken out of my dresser and closet, papers and supplies taken out of my desk, toys taken out of their places, and books removed the book shelf- piles of stuff everywhere and I was in the middle of the mess.  My mom naturally questioned what on earth I was doing and firmly reminded me that I was supposed to be cleaning my room.  

What I then tried to explain to my mom was that in order to really clean my room it needed to get messier before it could get clean.  I was rearranging and reorganizing everything in order to make my room as clean and tidy as possible.  My mom was skeptical but the explanation pacified her.  It took me a long time to clean my room, but in the end it truly was clean.

I’m hoping the mess of life is like the mess of my bedroom.  We can see that the world is a mess on the surface.  We can bring in a dust rag and a vacuum and things might look better.  Or we can open the closet, pull out the desk and dresser drawers, empty out the storage baskets and really deal with the mess.  This may require being knee-deep or even deeper in the mess for a while, but eventually the world will be restored.  

In the meantime I sit here and try to make sense of the piles of mess around me, I try to figure out how the mess was created in the first place and what I can possibly do to fix the profound brokenness in the world.

I wish there was a simple checklist to loving our neighbor, eliminating injustice, and restoring wholeness.  But it’s not a neat and straightforward 5-step process.  It’s messy and I hate the mess.