GIFTS IN THE MESS
It’s been some time since I’ve written a blog or written much of anything. On May 5 I began a three-month sabbatical. It was unbelievably renewing and lent clarity to me, my life, my family and my work like I have never had.
Over the next few weeks I plan to share a few of the things I learned during sabbatical. Beginning with the need to sort through the mess of our lives.
As I began my sabbatical things felt foggy, I felt a bit stuck and things were messy. Mind you, this is an exciting place to be. As Michael Brooks says, “… being completely and utterly stuck can be a good thing; it often means a revolution is coming.”
What I am learning is the revolution will only come if we are willing to walk further into the fog, and jump deeper into the mess.
This is important because not all messes are bad messes. Consider the last time you hosted a party at your house and the mess left after. Of course, there are the bad messes after a party, but there are also good messes.
This summer my wife and I celebrated our daughter’s fourth birthday and invited several of her 4-year-old friends to our home for a party. In no time our backyard was humming with activity as kids ran through our sprinklers and devoured cake. The energy really exploded when it was time for presents. My daughter shredded every piece of wrapping paper and every gift bag to find what was inside. As soon as as the flurry of gift giving had started it was over.
My daughter grabbed her favorite gifts and ran into our house with her friends to play, and our patio was buried beneath 6 inches of wrapping paper, gift bags and tissue paper. I began clean up, gathered a huge amount of paper and gift-wrap and wedged it into our recycle bin – and that’s when I noticed a pink tail of a pony sticking out between the wrapping paper.
Scattered through the mess on my patio were gifts my daughter had been given. Which meant I had to sort through the mess so I could find the gifts. This is the good kind of mess.
Because even in the times we feel stuck, when the landscape of life is covered in fog and there is mess we’d rather not sort through – in those very places there are gifts to be uncovered. Which means we have a choice to make. Stubbornly ignore the mess or dive into it.
As I considered whether or not I wanted to dive into the good mess of my life, I watched an interview with the incomparable Frederick Buechner. He was asked, if someone said they were looking for God, “What would you tell them?”He paused for a moment and said, “Pay attention,” he paused as if reflecting on what he just said before he said it again with more passion, “Pay attention!”
And with that, I knew I had to stop and pay attention to the mess so I could find the gifts amidst the litter of the last seven years. And what I learned is what Eugene Peterson observes … messiness is the precondition of creativity. Sometimes the places and spaces and messes we’d rather ignore are the very places that offer the greatest gifts. And this is where I began. In the mess - a good mess - and I found it to be glorious because in it were a countless number of gifts I would have missed otherwise. And let's not forget, "every good and perfect gift is from above."
Which leads me to ask, what are the messes you’ve ignored? It’s possible, at first glance, it looks like a bad mess. But even there, in the midst of chaos, God is one who can and will give us gifts. Perhaps it’s time to dive in … and should you choose to do that you have to first stop and pay attention. If we can do that, there is a good chance we'll find more than a gift - we'll find a God who has been there the whole time.