What a mess! We got out our drawer of wool bits and pieces to make a wool picture and discovered that it is a real mess. When we were after a certain colour, it was very tempting to just cut it all apart, but that would have meant cutting up very useful lengths of different colours, so I gently teased them out, and wound them up, and was able to use them in our picture.
It reminded me of what God must see of our lives sometimes - a tangled mess of sinfulness that needs to be untangled, and gently teased out to be made into something useful and beautiful. I wonder if He would like to hack away at it? But He doesn't, knowing why it is the way it is, and how to untangle and unwind it, if we'll just cooperate.
It reminded me, too, that sometimes in the lives of others, when we see mess, we're tempted to hack away at what's wrong, instead of being patient and gently teasing out the good and pulling it away from the rest of the mess. Can we allow others to be messy while God deals with them? Jesus must have seen so much 'mess' in His dealings with people, so how did He deal with it?
I don't think mess bothers God as much as it does us, especially those among us who like to be tidy or ordered. God is the most ordered being in the Universe, and yet He copes quite well with our messes and is able to turn them into something useful and beautiful. He trades our ashes for beauty over and over again. He is the ultimate recycler!
So, can we give Him our mess, and let Him do something with it, or are we tempted to hide it in the cupboard, or try and hack away ourselves, before we present it to Him?
Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Hebrews 4:16
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