this is on my mind...

 Life is so messy sometimes. Well, let’s be honest- life is messy most all of the time.

Throughout Advent this year, I’ve taken a step back from writing here and have spent many hours thinking, reading, memorizing scripture, praying, and pondering. The words that have echoed this year: “pay attention”, “slow down”. The season of distancing and quarantine has helped obedience to those words, but I still can find myself distracting myself with any variety of means.

I wanted to share a short bit of my December thoughts before we move back to more ‘normal’ ideas around gender and sexuality.

I cannot get over how willing God always is to get elbow deep in the mud and mess around me, around you, around all of us.

Think about it- God creates Adam by forming him out of the dust. He gets down into the dust and forms His creation. The person that would be the bearer of His image. He shaped and molded with intricate care. He could have just spoken Adam into being, but He formed Him. He got dirty doing it.

However the forming looked, there’s just no way that God escaped the dirt.

I personally hate dust. It gets everywhere, into every crevice. 

During the summer I work more than full time at a local, Christian camp. Days and weeks of walking on the dusty roads, fields, and campfire sites, leave your feet covered in what the staff call “permadirt”. The kind that needs scrubbed with a brush to really get it off. My car, driving on the camp road,  gets coated with a fine sheen of dust that a light rain only smears around to make more dirt. The dust is so prevalent that I often use it as a teaching tool for how closely we want to walk with Jesus- close enough to get covered in the dust that His feet kick up.

Thankfully, God does not seem averse to the dust.

And then, after digging up to His elbows in the dust to form His image bearer,  in a very unsanitary fashion, He breathes life into Adam’s nostrils. In today’s Covid, distancing, masking, world, breathing into someone’s nostrils is an outrageous thought.

If you’ve ever performed CPR on a live person, not a training mannequin, you understand the intimacy created by breathing into someone’s nostrils.

God is not distant, sanitary, untouched, or unconcerned with my mess.

Then I move on to picture Jesus’ birth- not the cleaned up picture of Him glowing in a beautiful wooden cradle. But the picture of Joseph helping his wife give birth- an incredibly messy, bloody, painful, and beautiful process. To watch a live birth is staggeringly beautiful (unless it’s me giving birth- then I vaguely remember!)

Mary had ridden on a donkey for days, went into labor and gave birth in a barn. I cannot imagine that they were provided with clean towels to wipe the blood and amniotic fluid off of Jesus. It was messy. And He was willing to be messy, again.

I grow more thankful every moment for Jesus’ willingness to be alongside me in the mess. I see Him alongside my friends in their mess, but shame can prevent me from accepting His hand in mine. But the Father has been gently prodding me, wooing me in a sense, into the mess. Staring straight at it and knowing that only with His help, can it be transformed. 

It’s the transformation that I’m after.

I want the new wine.

I want the best fruit on my vine to offer to Him.

I want a redeemed mind focused on Him.

The path to the wine, the fruit, the redemption- goes straight through the mess.

A while back I wrote about a story that I read in the book Courage Dear Heart, about how a luna moth emerges from its cocoon- when just a short time before, it had been a large larva attached to a branch. She describes in a beautiful and haunting way how the larva completely dissolves during the growing of the moth. It’s not like a transformer toy that you shift some parts around and voila’- a luna moth. 

There is a complete destruction of the old and a forming of the new. Again, it’s messy. A liquified larva inside a small cocoon, formless and shapeless. But as it submits to His design- it emerges magnificent and new.

As I, and you, approach 2021, I want to lay quietly in His arms and anticipate the beauty that he is bringing out in me- and in you. It requires living through the dissolving of the old, which is painful. He sees that- He is not unaware of the pain. He is close to the brokenhearted.

And He is after His glory expressed in each of us. 

Don’t you want to reflect his glory?

Don’t you want to see all that He can transform in you?

I do. I’m excited for it. 

Let’s stay close through this next year and see what He is doing.