"You must be doing something wrong.
People just don't have that many bad things happen to them."
Seriously...
This was said ... out loud, on purpose.
A dear friend, a long-time-not-old-cause-that-sounds-rude friend of mine told me...
someone actually said this to her.
My friend, who has had so many years of so much crap, of so much hard and messy and scary.
She told me this
and then I yelled, out loud.
Really loud.
Like Norb opened the door and checked on me kind of loud.
Obviously, this well-intentioned-overly-opinionated (careful Kathy) person,
we've obviously never met.
Or she's never met any of mine. Because we are people and we have many bad things happening to us. Right now. Over and over.
Her heads in the proverbial sand... way down deep.
We've got a bunch of messy going on over here.
And I've realized it's not gonna clean up any time soon.
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| Don't mock... I love these! |
I'm the label-maker-loving, drawer sorting, color-coded-filing lover of all things neat and orderly. I love a made bed. I love a beautiful pile of folded clothes.
I hate piles of paper and corners filled with clutter and junk.
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| Don't mock... I hate this! |
And herein lies the irony.
Life is messy.
If you think you're the only messy out there. Take heart... you are not alone.
If yours is not messy, if your life is predictable and relatively easy, I'm not writing this to mock you. I don't even doubt you. But pay attention. Broken lives. Struggling families. Addiction, incarceration, sickness, chronic disease, families and friends who are in a crisis. They aren't to be judged, corrected, or bullied.
You might say your intention isn't to bully or criticize, just to correct and to help.
Perfect. Do that. Minus the correcting part, there's One who does that beautifully, and without shame. He's got it covered. Trust Him with it... and don't think because you ate pizza before bed last night that the revelation and wisdom oozing out of your brain means it was God. Because your hormonally imbalanced this week, or you read something once by someone somewhere and it sounds something like this. That doesn't mean now you know the answers to all of their problems. Because the thoughts are in your head, it doesn't meant they should come out of your mouth.
"Because I love you" doesn't make the cut, doesn't give permission to say it.
Trust me. That one was thrown in my face once, in a church lobby... but that's another story.
And now that I'm writing this I'm freaked out
I'm afraid I've been that person.
I'm realizing that I've believed I had the authority to tell someone how messed up they are, believing I said it in love.
I was wrong.
I don't wanna be that wrong any more.
God forgive me for taking on your role without your permission too many times.You might ask, doesn't God use people to help other people?
Yes. God does place us in conversations and relationships that allow us, command us, to walk through stuff with someone. To confront addiction, to confront destructive behavior or abusive relationships.
When God truly calls someone to speak up I believe it is usually preceded by soul-searching, some agonizing, but not preceded by I can't wait to set them straight.
Doesn't God use us?
Isn't there anything we can do to clean this up, to make a difference, to help?
Oh yes... beautifully and deeply and affectively.
We help by praying.
We help by praying for them, not at them.
We help by loving them.
We love by loving their kids, or their parents, or their husband or their wife.
We love by helping them move, by bringing them food, by taking them to coffee, by paying their rent, or their utilities, or buying them a car, or paying medical bills.
We help by loving, we love by showing up and shutting up.
We should love.
Not by trying to make their lives look all neat and organized like yours or how I wish mine could be.
But by just showing up...
Taking a seat beside them...
Loving them, in their messy, oh so messy life.
