Friday, October 26, 2012

Mess

Recently, Ann Voskamp posted about the necessity of writing about our messy lives in order to encourage others with mess...

I confess I haven't written much of late because life has been, well, a mess.

More things drop through the cracks these days because the cracks are wider...the cracks in my memory, in my organization skills, in holding my children accountable, in my calendar, in my general everyday life.

And that makes things messy.  At least they feel very messy.  Piles that I know need to be put away or given away or thrown away or sorted stay in the same places for weeks or months or maybe even a year or more because of all of these cracks.  Projects and cleaning and correspondence and planning go undone while I barely keep up with the immediate needs...food and relationship.

But God promised me that He is ok with this mess.  In fact, I'm pretty sure He's orchestrated the whole deal because He wants to get rid of the wax that formerly filled in the cracks.  He's heated things up so that the wax, try as it might, cannot do anything but melt away.

Apparently in days of clay pots, the pots would often come out of the kiln with cracks in them.  The vendors would then cover over the cracks with wax mixed with clay in order to present a pot that looked whole and complete to the buyer.  The new owner of such a pot would not know it's pot had cracks until putting it on the fire and seeing the liquid inside begin to seep out the sides as the cracks were exposed at the melting of the wax.

I was born with cracks.  We all were.  And life and others and ourselves see these cracks and think that in order to make the pot presentable those cracks have to be filled in.

Any crack I fill in of my own accord out of my own strength...well, there are all sorts of problems with that.  Some of the cracks are intended to be there by my Maker.  They make me unique and are part of my giftings.  Some of them come from woundings and from being born into a sinful world.  Those can only be filled in by the Maker.

So I find my focus shifting in this season...from filling in cracks to letting the cracks show.

I'm also realizing that only being able to focus on food and relationship is probably a pretty good thing.