I do not like messy. I can handle dirty, but not messy. For instance, it is less of a concern to me that there are dust bunnies on my wood floor than that there are books all over the floor of my office. I am not as concerned about dirty dishes in the sink as I am about countertops covered in junk mail. I don't let toothpaste in the sink worry me as much as dirty clothes covering the bathroom floor.
Sunday was messy. At 7:45pm, we headed all of our dirty children upstairs for a quick bath. It had been a day of constant ministry. Church that morning, a fundraiser lunch and afternoon of activities, and a community trunk or treat event that I had help organize. The kids were sticky from candy and hayrides. Their faces had been painted and so had their hands, when they decorated pumpkins.
We tried to walk through the living room but baby boy had scattered all the candy over the floor and we slipped and slid to the staircase. The stairs were littered with pajamas, shoes, Sunday clothes, and costumes. The kids bathroom was a picture of a perfect disaster where a toddler had thrown every bath toy onto the floor and hidden toothbrushes in the hairbow drawer. When the kids were finally in bed, and a path to the toilet cleared in case of midnight needs, I headed downstairs where I longed to crash.
Instead, I started picking up candy in the living room and then proceeded to our bedroom and bathroom. Our bathtub was full of lemonade trash (it's not as strange as it would seem) and our floor was covered with the many changes of clothes that today had required. In my exhaustion, I began to think about these things:
Ministry is messy. Getting into people's lives is messy. They have stuff and I have stuff and when all that stuff gets together, there is a mess!
I stay away from mess. It brings out the OCD side of me and I want to compulsively clean it up!
By staying away from mess, I keep myself from ministry.
Is that wrong?
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Waiting to Dance
Dancing in community
I am a wife, mother and friend. But above all, I am a daugther of the king seeking to please Him through this dance called life.
Waiting to Dance
Rhesa
About Me
- Rhesa Higgins
- I am a minister's wife, a mother to three, and a proud ACU grad!
How this dance works...
I will post once a week on this blog to discuss with you how my dance is going. I hope that this will become a conversation about each of our dances. Won't you join in?
Dancing in community
3 comments:
Your post today reminded me of a message we heard from Jeff Walling at the Tulsa workshop in 2006. It was called "The Messy Messiah".
Here is a quote from him I have in Bible.
"In the genealogy of Jesus, God chose to have Matthew talk about Tamar who dressed as a prostitute, Rahab the harlot, Ruth who grew out of incestuous relationships & Uriah's wife who was Bathsheba.
Jesus came from the lives of Messy people. Even Mary was pregnant without being married. Maybe that's why He's called Messiah -- It's messy." Jeff Walling, Tulsa 2006
Kind of puts our ministry into a scary perspective! Thanks for the reminder!
Rhesa! I found your blog through Liz's. I've thought about sweet Raemey so much since teaching at Little Acorns when she was 2. I hope your family is doing well and give our love to sweet R.
I am by nature a "fixer". I was that way as a child and I am that way now. I want to be in the middle of chaos because that is typically where I am most comfortable. However, I often take it personally when I can't help someone, I take it as a failure. I have to continually remind myself that it is not my job to "fix" anyone. That is totally up to Jesus Christ. It is simply our jobs as His children to lead people to Truth and to be fishers of men...and I've never been on a clean fishing trip!
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