04 Mar Finding Rest in the Mess

About two weeks ago after church, I was struck in the head by a soccer ball. I was chasing my two-year-old daughter who had ecstatically run into the middle of the quad where two boys were kicking a ball to one another (she suffers from a misconception that wherever a ball is present, she is the Ronaldo everyone has been waiting for). It was perfect-bad timing, and the midair ball was intercepted… by my head! If I had any soccer skills, I could have passed it off as an intentional header, but, alas, I am no professional.

While I experienced a slight shock from the blow, I was seemingly fine and carried her back into the safety of the church building where I continued to watch her as she gleefully ran around the chairs and bystanders. About ten minutes later, I found myself crying uncontrollably.

The most prominent emotion I felt by my sudden breakdown was embarrassment and vulnerability as surprised congregants gathered around me, but I was also dumbfounded as to where all this was coming from. After much reflection over the following days, I realised that, though nothing major was happening in my life, a lot was happening. Often when there is so much going on we go into autopilot mode, holding ourselves together until a small little trigger — in my case a soccer ball — pushes the last of our buttons, and we implode.

Taking inventory

Things get busy, and sometimes there is no way of escaping it, but it’s about how we take care of ourselves and what we are allowing to surround those busy circumstances that determines how well we cope. My sudden emotional display on that Sunday indicated that something was remiss in how well I was managing my busyness. So, with journal and pen in hand, I spent time on my own to reflect.

I first started with listing everything that had been taking up my time, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that there were a lot of worries and stress caused by negative thoughts about my personal failings. It was not my circumstances exhausting me, it was the pressure I was putting on myself through negative thinking that had exhausted me.

Sorting through the mess

Like unpacking a cupboard into which I had shoved unsightly items, I was confronted with many thoughts: being an inadequate mother, an incompetent manager of our home, an imposter at work, in general a feeling of being an incapable child in an adult’s body. But worst of all, a consistent guilt that I was failing as a Christian because of all my worldly coping mechanisms and not having enough faith.

I realised that I was trapped in a cycle of negative beliefs that left me powerless to change, while perpetuating the problems with my own repeated mistakes. With all this laid out in front of me, the thing I found myself saying to God was, “Lord, I’m a mess.” To which I felt Him answer, “But you’re my mess.”

At these words, I felt God show me a wonderful analogy which came in the form of when my daughter had a friend over for a playdate and they emptied her toy box in the middle of the living room. This pile gradually expanded across the whole living area as they happily explored the various items and ran off playing with them. Once the playdate was over, I settled on the floor and started to pack the toys away, which then became an exercise in creating more order out of the toy box. I restacked and regrouped parts so that they could be played with as a complete toy and not with missing pieces, but most importantly, I sorted the actual toys that had been gifted to her and belonged in the toy box from the random objects that had somehow found their way in: clothes pegs, spoons and clothes we had been searching for being chief among them.
I believe this is what God does with us when a trigger brings our mess to the surface, He sorts through it with us.

Finding rest

It was the biggest relief to know that God is not repulsed by my mess, because I’m a work in progress and He is sorting through it. Unless we allow Jesus to unpack our hidden, stuffed-to -the-brim cupboards, it cannot be sorted out. And He doesn’t expect us to sort it out on our own, nor does He rush us. The same way I settled down on the floor and in a relaxed manner started going through all the items while Jo re-discovered some treasured toys, Jesus comes alongside us and gently sorts through all our items, allowing us to rediscover treasured gifts from Him, and removing the random objects that don’t belong in our box.

With the above analogy in mind, I’d like to reimagine one of my favourite scriptures, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28 NIV) as, ‘Come to me all you who have burdened yourselves with guilt and negative thoughts, and I will give you rest.’

To avoid the mess forming in the first place, we should be taking captive every thought exactly as Paul instructs us to do in 2 Corinthians 10:5, but often busyness is the culprit that prevents us from doing this. Which is why it is important to ensure we take care of ourselves by setting aside however much time we can, even if just for ten minutes, to pause, breathe, reflect, cast our minds to Jesus and allow the redemptive work of the cross to wash over us and calm our troubled hearts. Because thanks to the cross, whatever our mess, in Jesus, we can find rest.

Question for the reader: What are some of the negative thoughts that are creating a ‘mess’ for you? Write them down and ask Jesus to come alongside you to sort through it and bring you healing.

Angela Chiaberta

I am a volunteer blogger with a passion for God and writing. My hope is to help others choose faith – or to walk deeper in their faith – through my own introspections and observations.