Messy IS Wonderful
I was listening to one of my favorite preachers (Steven Furtick) the other day, and he said something that made me go….hmmmm, and really think about the implication of the statement. He was talking about traveling and getting “stuck” in Chicago during his trip home. I’ve traveled, and I’ve been “stuck” in airports several times, so his story was really resonating with me….I could remember the feelings of frustration, and sometimes even helplessness when I was in one place and couldn’t get to my destination. It was what he said next that left me thinking…..he said that he and his wife had traveled to Chicago before, and in fact, really like Chicago…..so it wasn’t WHERE he was that was causing him to be “stuck”… it was the fact that he was where he was and not where he EXPECTED to be that caused him to define himself as “stuck”. It wasn’t his destination or even the situation, as much as it was the disruption to what he had envisioned that made him “stuck”.
How many times has this been my situation…..I’m in a place that I didn’t expect to be, and because what is happening isn’t on MY schedule, or meeting MY expectation, I give the situation or circumstance some negative label, like “stuck”. The more I have been thinking about this, the more I recognize that it is when my current position does not meet my current expectation, that my “trouble” begins….and instead of looking for the treasure where I am, I begin to focus on how I can get myself to wherever it was that I thought I was “supposed to be” going. I’ve been thinking since I heard Steven’s sermon how many opportunities I might have missed because my focus was not on my situation, but on MY EXPECTED destination. In those circumstances where I might have described myself as “stuck”, was I really EXACTLY where I was “supposed to” be, but so focused on being elsewhere that I missed whatever it was that God had for me right where I was?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “mess” in my life…..if I were to define my life by how close to my expectations my reality is, then I might define my life as a “mess”…..but, if, instead, I was to look at the “mess” of my life and remember that nothing occurs in my life by “accident”….that in every situation there is a victory, or a lesson, then I might have a different attitude about the state of my life.
I believe my life will always be a “mess”…..by that I mean that I will likely spend the rest of my days with some “expectation” for how things should go…..(no matter how “healthy” I get, I still think that part of being a human will remain). And if I judge my life as “mess” or “not mess” by how close my reality is to my expectations, then I think that I’ll always be in some degree of “messiness”. Additionally, at this point, I don’t plan to move to a solitary island, and I intend to continue to interact with other humans, and whenever humans are involved, there is some degree of messiness!
The challenge for me, then, is to determine what to do when I find myself in a mess, of one degree or another. For as long as I can remember, my focus has been on “cleaning up”, “fixing” and “avoiding future” mess! My measure of success for a long time has been how “un-messy” my life is. What I’m learning is that the degree of success is not whether there’s a mess around or not, but rather, how I decide to live IN the mess! I can define things that don’t go my way or cause me to change course as “stuck”, or “mess” or I can embrace the life that I have, and look for the treasures and lessons around me. I’ve come to believe that serenity is not the absence of mess in life, but the ability to see past the mess and find the wonderful.
Instead of wishing all the mess away….I want to live understanding that messy is real, but messy is wonderful, too!