If your home is anything like ours, there are plenty of days when the house looks like a scene from Home Alone. With three young boys (who all seem to have a talent for being messy), tidying and training is a constant battle. Besides their ability to create mess out of seemingly nothing, what surprises me most is their ability to let the mess inspire new games or activities. Couches turn into forts, recycling turns into rockets, anything can turn into a drum kit, and the list goes on. Of course if you sprinkle Lego over all of that, then you really know the kids are in for a great time! Generally speaking, kids specialise in not only creating mess, but using mess to create something amazing!
This year as a staff, we are reading the Bible in a year using the Nicky Gumbel plan. Although it is still only early days, there are clear themes presenting themselves, particularly as we weave our way through the early books of the Old Testament. What has struck me the most is God specialises in mess! Let me explain.
Whether you have read the Bible a lot or a little, one thing you will soon learn is all the main characters of the Bible have serious flaws. By today’s standards, a lot of the behaviours we read about would be considered serious criminal acts! Now don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not here to run down Abraham, Moses and all the other big names from the Old Testament, what I am here to do is tell you that God used their mess to create something amazing.
As you read their accounts, time after time we see God using imperfect people who made serious mistakes to orchestrate his perfect plan that ultimately leads us to Jesus. In Jesus’ time on Earth we see that theme continue with him spending the majority of his time with those with messy lives; the broken, oppressed, outcast, afflicted and the list goes on. If this was the case, why do we so often associate Christianity with needing to be clean and perfect, or at least appear that way? Jesus commands us to love God and love people; tangibly love people, to meet the needs of people right where they are and bring a little bit of heaven to someone’s life here and now. Life is messy, people make mistakes, however that is where God shines, and that is where we should shine also.
God loves you mess and all. He wants to use it to orchestrate something beautiful. As we often say to our students here at school, there is nothing you can do to make God love you any more, and nothing you can do to make him love you any less. Let’s be a community who live that out and meet people right where they’re at and love them however we can.
God, give me strength to keep loving Lego, especially when I tread on it in the middle of the night!
Have a great week everyone.
Glen