From Messy to Meaningful
Despite all the sage advice from older women to appreciate the proverbial fingerprints on the windows, I don’t instinctively look at a mess, whether physical, emotional, or relational, and appreciate it. Instead I look at a mess and think Who made it? or Who is going to clean it up? Truthfully, I am more apt to be concerned with how it affects me, but thankfully Jesus does the opposite. He somehow looks beyond my actions and the mess I create and sees me, my future, His child. He promises to take that mess and use it. My messiness doesn’t push Him away. My mess doesn’t deter His love. He’s not overwhelmed by me. My whole life He’s taken the messy side of me and made it meaningful.
In the New Testament, I am moved by how Jesus, when encountering a blind man, took the very dirt the man was sitting in and used it to make him see. He took the very substance, the ground that was his physical prison, the place he spent all day at the mercy of unseen strangers and turned it into healing material. He promises to use things for my good, which then means no mess is too big or will be wasted.
When I can’t see past my mess or the mess around me, I can rehearse that, He, the one on whom my faith rests, is the substance of things hoped for (Hebrews 11:1). The substance.
He gets dirty with me, not waiting until I’m out of it. He sometimes uses the very dirt that is around me to change me. He allowed the messy, barbaric, dirty manner of His death to set captives free, to change the course of history for all mankind.
He sometimes uses the very dirt that is around me to change me.
When He promises that He will use things for my good, I can look around at the mess I’m in full of unescapable mounds of dirt that seemingly promise to bury me, yet believe this is where the words of life in the Bible move and create new life.
There are times in life when we may feel there is no way this mess, this diagnosis, this problem, this dirt, will be used for good. He promises to be faithful to Himself and me. He will use this mess for my good and His glory (Romans 8:28), but what is good is defined by Him, not me with my earthly view.
Like the blind man, sitting in the dirt, I wait expectantly and patiently for Him to do the same for me, and when I hear His voice to get up out of the dirt, the mess around me, I will trust the Healer to finish what He promised He would do, take my mess and make it meaningful.
