Celebration: {Day 19} Messy Art

Hi, I'm Rachel.  Neat Freak is my middle name.  (Or Organized, whatever.)

I don't remember what I was like when I was little, but by the time I reached the second decade of my life, my neat freak-y tendencies were well established.

I had a neat little room with a neat little desk and a neat little planner on the desk.  The drawers, the closet, my life were all models of tidiness.  I took both comfort and pride in my well-ordered, well-oiled life.

And then...grace.

It was disruptive.  Unsettling.  Messy.

Perhaps that was part of why I'd resisted (and ignored) it for so long: it was like a hand sweeping away my illusion of control.

If I accepted grace, I'd have to live with gray areas.  I'd to have to be okay with imperfection - in myself and in others.  I'd have to come to terms with the idea that dealing with situations was not simply a matter of pulling the appropriate folder from a metaphorical file cabinet.

I'd have to admit that I didn't have it all figured out, and furthermore couldn't figure it all out.  I'd have to realize that truth didn't come in uniform doses, to be gulped down once a day with a glass of water.

I'd have to trust myself, my life, my future (and everyone else's, too) to a God who did not fit in a desk drawer divider or in a shoebox on a shelf - a God who isn't 100% predictable, yet always entirely faithful.

Slowly I started to open my heart.  To trust this God of messy grace.  To surrender to the fact that I am a work in progress and not a finished piece.

God is an artist, painting the story of our lives with masterful grace-strokes, and letting Him work means relinquishing the need for control (whether that takes the form of neat freak-iness or something else).  Who would expect the studio to be tidy while the picture is still being painted?  Who would think of finding the paint bottles with their tops all closed, the palette washed and tucked away in a box, the easel folded in a corner?

One day His grace-art will be finished.  And it will be beautiful.  Until then, let's remember that we can't have the beauty without the mess.  In fact (dare I say it?), we can celebrate the messy as evidence of the work He is doing.