A
Beautiful Mess
By Peggy Kleckner
“Clearly, you are a
letter from Christ showing the result of our ministry among you. This ‘letter’
is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is
carved not on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.”
2
Corinthians 3:3 (NLT)
It
was a Sunday morning. I was feeling frustrated yet again. I felt disorderly on
the inside and my home felt cluttered and disorganized. I was familiar with
this feeling of inadequacy and burdened by it, but unsure what to do with it.
Meanwhile, I plunked myself down in front of my bowl of cereal and started to
flip through the Sunday coupons. Suddenly I wanted to burst out laughing and
knew that God was saying to me exactly what my husband lovingly tells me often,
“Lighten up, woman!”
There
in the ad, in a lovely script font were the words “A beautiful mess.” An artist
had collected the dust from ten homes that was swept up with a cleaning product
and arranged it into those words written across a wood floor. [1]
So,
can God take the dust of my life, as well as the lives around me, and arrange
them as a letter of love on the floor of this world? I would bow down and say
“yes,” He most certainly can.
So
there I sat, bowed down in worship to the one, true God who can make all things
possible. Who can take all of my messes and somehow arrange them for good. I
was cheered on by those three words hidden in the open of a public ad for me on
a day when I needed them.
Oh,
but that was not the end. I shared those words with a woman at church who went
away encouraged and giggling. Then on Monday I shared them with the women I
work with. Today, I share them with you.
God
can take our messiness. He is not repulsed by it, any more than we are repulsed
by our own child smiling behind a face full of cake frosting from the cake we
baked for them.
It
is us who try to hide, thinking that we have to have it all together before we
can be loved, before we can be used by God. Oh, how wrong we are.
God
sent Jesus right into the middle of our messiness to say, “I love you” while we
were yet sinners….perfection amidst imperfection.
GOING
DEEPER:
1. What mess do you need to willingly hand over
to God?
2. Do you, in the depth of your heart, truly
believe that God can create beauty from ashes?
FURTHER
READING:
[1]
You can see the ad “being made” at www.ocedar.com/beautifulmess
Peggy is a wife and
mother of four adult children - - two sons and two stepsons, and is an active
encourager at Oakwood Church in Delafield.
