Embrace the Mess

This past year has seen some of the hardest challenges of my life so far. Last year I was going to school and getting ready to go into finals when I injured my knee and needed surgery. Within two months of that I found out that I wouldn’t be able to continue school and finish my degree the next year with only seven classes to go because of an error with my reimbursement through work. About a month after than I found myself in yet another serious trial.

I was a mess. I was devastated, angry, confused and utterly the definition of a mess. Much like Job I had long sometimes loud and at other times sorrowful conversations with God asking why. Why would he allow this to happen to me? Why was I going through all of this? I wanted to give up on God, but I couldn’t and even if I could my mess prevented me from moving to the right or to the left.

I believe we all have had those moments, whether big or small, where we’ve wondered why? Why couldn’t are lives be neat and tidy, put together masterpieces ready to be on display for all to see? Yet here we stand in the muck and the mess of the daily stuff not sure where to start and how to even begin to clean it up. In these moments, I want to encourage you, is where I’ve seen God prove his goodness and faithfulness to me. I believe that God wants to show up in your mess too.

Job 36:15-16 says, “He delivers the afflicted in their affliction and opens their ears [to His voice] in adversity. Indeed, God would have allured you of of the mouth of distress into a broad place where there is not situation of perplexity or privation; and that which would be set on your table would be full of fatness.” Pastor Ben preached Sunday that sometimes we need to stop running for our mess and trying to get through our mess and instead just embrace it. This verse is telling us something similar. It is in our affliction, our suffering, our messy lives that God uses those very things to deliver us.

Sometimes the greatest ways we will experience God is letting him show up right there. Too many times I think we need to feel cleaned up and pretty to meet with God, but God instead wants to be let into those very moments that we would rather sweep under the rug. What if our mess was the place God wanted to allure us into his presence. Another version of this scripture says that God wants to woo us from our distress.

A year later, I still have some mess still. God is still working healing and restoration in my life. Yet I can honestly say that the last year I’ve experienced God’s presence in my life like never before. I’ve heard his voice in my adversity and he has truly woo’d me into an open place to a table of joy and wholeness.

Wherever you are in this journey with the Lord today, I just want to encourage you to embrace your mess. Don’t sweep it under the couch or try to dress it up to look presentable. Come before God and offer the mess to Him and I pray that you would experience his faithfulness to you in a greater way and that you too would be able to look back and see how God brought you to an open place and a table that was full!

Embracing the Mess,

Alayna Mills