I love a nice, clean, tidy space. But somewhere, if I'm the one responsible for the cleanliness of said space, there's a pile of junk somewhere close by. It's super convenient if people are coming over to just scoop it up in one fell swoop of my arms and relocate the pile of unwanted-ness out of plain sight, but when the party is over, that pile almost always comes back out to the exact same spot.
My husband has developed a pile-building tendency as well over the course of our 9 years of marriage. His pile sits messily next to mine and is often "hairier", so my pile is nicely stacked where his pile has papers jutting out in all directions, and uneven items, like a pair of pliers or broken headphones that render his pile unsteady and ready to topple at any given moment.
There's another difference in our pile building...how we get rid of, or overcome the pile. He can clean his up in one sitting, while I will go through mine and basically reorganize it, removing maybe 10% of the contents. I'll proudly set my pile back in its original spot with my onlooking husband rolling his eyes at my inability to conquer the pile, yet again.
I have a pile in the kitchen, a pile on the formal dining table, a pile in our master bedroom and a pile in the closet.
(This seriously makes me sound like I have issues, yes?)
What's the point?
I think the way I build piles to maintain a sense of calm in the rest of my house is a metaphor for how we sometimes cope with hard things in life. Hard things are hard, amen?
Instead of dealing with piles of junk (or hard, broken things about our lives), we stack them up, neatly, if possible, and try to go about life as if they don't exist. All the while, proudly displaying the "clean" part of our house (read: lives) for everyone else to see. This does favors for no one.
Have you been around people who are so perfect that their perfection only causes you to see your own inadequacies? I have. I bet I've even fronted myself so that others have had that same response to me. I hope not, but I am realistic to know that it's probable. I've come along way in the past 10 years in this area...I truly believe authenticity is one of the most important keys to living a life that is loving, hospitable, sensitive and obedient to the Lord.
So authenticity means you let your imperfections show.
It means you're vulnerable and real about the brokenness that sits in a pile in the corner of your heart.
Hard things are evidence of the broken state of our world. The fact that we see them as hard is proof to me that we were created for more than this broken world. We are broken in some big ways...marriages, kids, finances, politics, health, faith, work-life balance, submission, justice. Let's face it, we're all a mess. But a lot of times, it's a heck of a lot easier to stick our heads in the sand and avoid the conversation all together. Or at least, compartmentalize the hard so that we can go about the rest of our day. We can only tolerate so much, right?
This, I think, is how I've gone about a lot of my life. Seeking the joy, minimizing the hard and flat out ignoring the hard that doesn't apply to me.
Now joy seeking is important, we were created for it and we need to experience it.
But it's not true joy if we don't face the hard, the broken. If you don't face those things, you end up with a fake joy that knows there's a pile of brokenness waiting for you in the next room. And if you compartmentalize that pile, you can rework it all day long, organize it, throw out the outlying pieces of it and then place it back neatly on the counter to continue to haunt you. The hard is still there and it still steals the joy.
We've got a hard thing going on right now, but this actually isn't a post about the details of our hard thing. It doesn't even necessarily matter, because the truth is, we're all walking through something hard. And it looks different for each person, and the capacity to handle the hard is different for every person. Details just cause us to compare our stories instead of dealing with the hard, broken thing head-on.
So in my metaphor of my numerous piles all over my house, the solution is simple.
THROW. OUT. THE. PILE.
Throw it out. Stop holding on to old thank you cards, continuing education flyers, confiscated toys and old crib sheets and notes from a conference 2 years ago. Throw them out. Be willing to sit down, roll up your sleeves and go through the pile to find the things worth keeping. Trash the rest.
The metapohor loses perfection here, because so much of our brokenness can't be walked out on, but it's close enough to continue. We have to get our hands dirty with our brokenness. We have to roll up our sleeves and engage it. To me, this looks like sharing it with the people who know you best and who can help you. It looks like helping the people who share their mess with you. It looks like seeking reconciliation and sometimes therapy.
Therapy is required to fix something that has been broken or another definition that I like, treatment to heal. So admitting that the broken exists is actually a pretty big step for me and I know some others out there, who enjoy being viewed as a put-together, self-sufficient, admirable person. So yes, admitting to myself that a pile exists, which seems kinda obvious, is a big deal. You have a pile too.
We have all got to stop trying to personify ourselves as perfection.
Secondly, we have to be willing to call our brokenness what it is and work through it. We can't continue to deny it, wish it away or pretend it's not there. Anything worth doing is going to be work. Ok the actual quote by Theodore Roosevelt is "nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty..."
This is just not how we think anymore. We want things to be easy, enjoyable and instant! Here's what I've learned to be true in the small ways I've personally experienced suffering or walked alongside someone who is. It changes everything about everything. It changes how you see the world, your expectations, your motivations, your urgencies and dependencies. It challenges your true belief on the goodness of God. It changes you from a life of entitlement, where the ultimate motivation is seeking personal happiness and immediate satisfaction to a life stripped down and focused on the basics.
This brings me to the last thing I'm finding to be so helpful in this area. Slow down. Or stop, even. Stop with all the busy-ness and doing and commitments and just allow boring days to be a thing again. Rest, pare down, trim the excess. If I'm busy, it's much easier to ignore things that need to be dealt with. Truly. And I'm pretty sure "staying busy" is at the top of the list of UNhealthy coping mechanisms.
When we're bored over here, we have backyard picnics and water balloon fights. We go through closets to get rid of clothes that are too old/small and talk about how good it feels to purge. We do random crafts. We bake things and we go on adventures around the neighborhood. We build towers of blocks and play card games. It's heaven on earth.
So while we can't just throw out the pile of brokenness that exists in each of our lives and surrounds us in the lives of our friends and neighbors and co-workers. We can lean into it, engage it and strip the power it has over us...not allowing it to isolate us, strike fear into our hearts or steal our hope. For there is always, always, hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment