As our mess ages, we end up with a message

​I had a friend say to me the other day, "I often think about how God can take my mess and make it into a message, and what that might look like."

I told her with no uncertainty, it would like me.

It occurred to me as she was saying this, that if you add the word age to the word mess, you get message. And it also occurred to me, that's the story of my life: a mess that has aged and has become a message.

I didn't spend much time in the ugly midst of my messes wondering what God would make of them. I was too busy making messes of my messes to imagine what good could ever come from any of it.

Maybe because in messes we often give up on good.

But I spend a fair amount of time every day these days marveling at what God has done with those messes. I am often overwhelmed with gratitude for the messages he has crafted from them.

It's comforting. It's comforting because it's not like my life is free of messes these days. It seems that while our old messes age into messages, new messes come along.

I look at messes differently these days, though. Because I do know what it would look like if God took my mess and made it into a message.

It would look like me.

And it would look like you.

Messes. Aging. Into Messages.

In the end, if you honor that process, there is nothing messy about it. There is only beauty in the mess.