When you make a mess of your life...

When I think about the Holiness of God, of His endless wisdom and understanding, of His power and authority … I realize how much He doesn’t mind cleaning up our messes.
 
When you really grasp that He is omniscient, all-knowing and all-understanding, you realize how foreign that is for us. He is levels and levels and levels above anything we could begin to wrap our minds about. He knows everything- past and future. Our brains cannot fathom that. It can never really make sense to us, no matter how hard we try to grasp that concept. He has no beginning. He has no end.

He is so big and we are so small, and yet he cares about the most trivial things in our lives, each and every day. 
 
I’m convinced that is why He gives us the gift of parenthood. So that we can understand what it is like for Him to be our Father, based on how we see our own children. We are infants to Him in comparison to our understanding. 
 
When we have babies, we know how dependent they are on us, how little self-control they have, how helpless they are. And we don’t expect them to be anything else! When babies poop because they can’t control their bowels, no parent is shocked or angry. We know it’s part of our role in their lives to clean them up, make them feel comfortable, put on a fresh diaper, love on them, and totally expect they willl do it again in a few hours.
 
God is fully expecting us to make messes of our lives. He knows we don’t know how NOT to. He WANTS to clean up our lives, give us fresh new mercies every day, and love on us after every mess.
 
Of course, He wants to see us grow into toddlers, meaning we start to have some new understandings of life and change as we grow in our walk with Him. Maybe we potty train and he doesn’t have to clean up THOSE messes anymore. But look at the new messes a toddler makes! They wreak havoc in totally new ways. 
 
And He knows that, is prepared, and doesn’t love us any less for it. Even mature Christians are hot messes. He will gladly clean up our mistakes from childhood to our last days because we will undoubtedly continue to make them.
 
Now imagine a toddler who won’t let their parent help them when they are in a bind. Imagine a toddler who is stubborn and insists on doing everything their way….(insert the strong-willed child) ….but one who also has free will. What a disaster. A toddler running around doing everything their way, making messes, trying to clean it up themselves, and never turning to their parent for help. 
 
God gives us the choice to run our own lives and will not intervene unless we ask. We have to accept His offer to clean up through surrender, repentance, and obedience. Not out of feelings of shame for our mistakes, but out of relief that we have help.
 
Use your free will to choose God as a father and invite Him to continue teaching you His way. Invite Him to continue cleaning up your messes- I promise you He is happy to do it if you will let Him.

Author

Julie Hilton is a Christian therapist in Alpharetta, GA. To schedule a free phone consultation, call 678-329-9129.