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:
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.
[1] You can see the ad “being made” at www.ocedar.com/beautifulmess
