What We See Is Not Always What Is Happening

​I led a training for school counselors and social workers yesterday on emotional awareness and management. Me—the guy who, for most of his life, was completely unaware of his emotions or what emotions even were. Me—the guy who used alcohol and a host of other unhealthy avenues to cope with buried emotions that were unknowingly determined to eat me alive.

For many years, my life was a mess (not that it doesn’t still have plenty of messy moments).

And for many years, God was working in the background of my mess, preparing me to be a minister of messes.

I told the group about the many years I worked as a counselor for adolescents in a therapeutic wilderness program. I told them that, for the first year of that experience, I was the absolute worst counselor ever. And I do mean EVER.

I told them it was because, in that first year, I stayed completely focused on the behaviors—the surface-level stuff—rather than the emotions beneath them. But those emotions? They told a much truer story of what these young people were struggling with than their behaviors ever could.

After my presentation, a young woman approached me and thanked me for sharing that story. She said she’s working on becoming a counselor and doubts herself a lot, so it was encouraging to hear someone talk openly about struggling early on in their counseling path.

That’s when I had to tell her—I have never been a "counselor." I have a business degree. But helpful counseling is ultimately about having the capacity to meet people in their messes.

On the way home, I kept thinking about that.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that God is meeting me in my messes because I start expecting God’s presence to feel like everything all cleaned up.

But then I wondered—does God even see anything as a mess?

I mean, I look back on my life and see a great mess. But when the aftermath of that mess was me ministering into the mess of another one of God’s children—at a time when she seemed to need it most—did mess even cross God's mind?

Maybe things feel so messy because we forget there are two sides to every mess:

-The side we see.
-The side where God is doing something we can’t yet see.

And in the middle of a mess? It’s much easier to focus on the first than the second.

But moments like yesterday remind me—ah, yes, God. Yesterday, or last year, or many decades ago, in the middle of what felt like a complete disaster, you were ministering me into becoming a minister of someone else’s mess.

You were reminding me that behind the scenes of every mess is a God who is creating beauty.

The fact that we don’t see or feel that? It’s not the story of a God who isn’t there. It’s the story of humans like me—humans who so easily lose sight of Him, who so easily lose trust in that truth when standing in the middle of the mess.

God is always doing something in our messes.

And that doesn’t always—or even often—look like a God with a broom and a dustpan.

No, more often than not, it’s a God with a paintbrush—creating beauty from the mess. A beauty that may not show up on a canvas for many, many years—but that is how the ultimate Minister of Messes works.

It’s a tough ask. Trust me, I know.

But as much as you can, try not to let the mess you see on the canvas in front of you blind you to the beauty being painted on the canvas just on the other side of the mess.

Sometimes that other side is slow in coming.

But we don’t have to be slow in recognizing that it is, indeed, coming.