Messes

I've been helping to straighten out the supply closets at my church. There is an abundance of items, from chalk, to tape, googly eyes, to thread. It's been a slow process for Laura, who started this project. I volunteered to take a lump of seemingly hopelessly tangled embroidery floss and thread home with me and turn it back into useful supplies. Some of them were easy to free from the mess. They immediately got wound onto a cardboard bobbin. Others were ridiculously tangled. Some pieces really weren't useful, but they still needed to be untangled from the mess before being tossed away.

There was a particularly difficult brown thread. At one point, someone suggested that I simply cut the portions of the thread that was so tangled. But, then it would be less useful for whatever purpose it would be selected for. Instead, I took about 30 minutes to untie, untangle, and unwind the thread from itself. 

Life can feel like that lump of strings, threads, and floss. At first glance, it's a hopeless mess and can be tempting to simply toss everything and hope to start over. But, when you really look at it, you can see some parts are just perfect the way they are and really aren't such a mess. Those are the parts of your life you might need to tidy up a bit, but they get a little extra love and set aside as things that don't need so much attention. As you continue to examine your life, you might find things that just are not useful to your future. Maybe they're bad habits, or simply things in your life that at one point were good and helpful but now have no real place in your life, or maybe there are people that aren't having a positive impact. Clear those out, and you have time to focus on the things that really need attention - those things that seem so hopelessly tangled that it might be tempting to toss them away with the definitely not useful parts.

When you really examine the tangles, you'll see that this piece is salvageable, it's just going to take some work and time. So, you (metaphorically, or maybe literally) sit down and slowly begin untangling. You move it this way, then that way, then back again. Some other knots might creep up while you're working on others. So, you stop and untangle that area before it gets too bad. You might have to abandon what you started to work on completely and start work on the complete opposite end of the ball of mess. Then, ah! You can more easily untangle the first part. Soon, that big mess that you thought impossible to save is no longer a mess. You're able to finish tidying it up, and set it aside. Eventually, you'll be able to untangle all of life's messes. All you need is patience, love, and God.