Cleaning Up the Mess (Friday Devotional)

 

Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you.

- 2 Corinthians 13:11

Thanks to my 6-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, our house is almost never clean for 24 hours straight. Lindsey and I can pick up every toy, dust every piece of furniture, vacuum every floor, and within a few hours we’ll find dirty shoes thrown in the middle of a room, Legos dumped on a floor, and books stacked on a table. If cleanliness truly is next to godliness, then in that respect children are truly diabolical.

Faced with that reality, Lindsey and I have a few ways we can deal with it. One is to complain—to moan and groan about the kids’ irresponsibility, to wonder aloud why we bother tidying up at all, to let off some steam without taking any constructive steps. Another is to take out that frustration on the kids, to needle and dictate and yell until they either clean up their mess or we all collapse in a pool of tears and sweat. Or finally, we can—hopefully with the assistance of the kids—clean up the mess in front of us. Another mess will come, surely—but for now we’ll deal with the one we see.

Life, just like a young family’s house, is inevitably messy. You can wish it were otherwise, you can nostalgically long for simpler days gone by, you can optimistically anticipate an easier future, but for now, it’s just messy. Every day you’re faced with a conundrum without a clear right-and-wrong answer; every day the world seems to get more and more complicated and confusing.

So when life’s messiness becomes a clear and present problem for you, you have to figure out how you’ll respond. You can complain—there’s certainly biblical precedent for lament when the world gets you down. You can lash out at others and play the blame game—this is the most hurtful option and, not coincidentally, the most tempting.

Or, with faithful humility, you can acknowledge two things. One, the world is broken, and I can’t fix it, only Christ can. Two, with the Lord’s help, maybe I can clean up the mess right in front of me. By praying for his will to be done, drawing upon his Word, and leaning on his Spirit, I can be an agent of restoration in a broken world. I can clean up my small share of the mess.

Complaining feels good in the moment, but the mess remains. Blaming feels even better, but often creates a brand new, bigger mess. But by picking up the metaphorical broom and dustpan, by adopting the role of a servant instead of a savior, things get a little better, even if only for a moment. Life will always be messy until Christ returns—but in the meantime, you can bring beauty to the broken places.