the mess of togetherness ...

Alright, I’ve had this one mostly done in the queue for several weeks now, so for the sake of diving in to this writing thing, I figured I would finish it off today.

"You have freedom to 100% rock this! ... Messy is good. God likes messy. He wouldn't have chosen us if He didn't like messy."

I heard a friend speak this word of encouragement during a worship rehearsal several weeks ago, and was compelled to write it down. Somehow, these two thoughts don’t seem like they should go together. Rocking it out elicits images of a finely-tuned, exhaustively practiced stage show. Messy is what it took to get there. Yes?

Yes.

When it comes to God, the getting there IS what He’s interested in. He doesn’t care how good of a show we can put on. Perfection is HIS business. All He asks is that we rock our mess. We must stand confidently in who we are (because of who He says that we are), right where we are, no matter how messy that might seem to us. Trust Him with our mess. Trust that He trusts us with our mess. He’s not waiting for us to get our acts together. He just wants us to bring what we have to the table. At the risk of sounding cliché, He’ll make our mess into a beautiful thing.

At the time, I posted this as my status on Facebook. Another friend commented, "Without an ox, there is no mess in the stable."

I wasn’t sure where that came from, but as ‘luck’ would have it, it popped up in our Bible study the following week. This little nugget of wisdom can be found in Proverbs 14:4, and goes on to say, “you need a strong ox for a large harvest.” In the gospels, Jesus says, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few.” God wants a large harvest. God needs us for that to happen. He knows that will involve our messes. He’s okay with that. He designed it that way.

The same goes for relationships. They're messy.

oh, it's just a part of being a family

taking the good with the bad and the ugly ...

- Sanctus Real

You could avoid the mess by avoiding the people, but you would also be missing out on the sweet fruit that relationships bring to your life. Being okay with the messiness of relationships is a lesson I have been learning lately. The cool thing is, when you’re stinky together, you tend not to notice the smell quite so much. And when you’re in it together, you get to work at cleaning up the messes together. In the end, I’d rather have the divided work of the mess of togetherness, than the mess of me by myself.