Construction Disarray by Cheryl Wyatt

So, this week my husband and I had birthdays. His was on February 15th and mine February 14th-Valentines Day :-) ).


We'd been planning to get rid of our carpet since we have a plethora of allergy and asthma sufferers in our house. What better time than our birthdays to rip the carpet out and put vinyl flooring down? LOL!

As my husband and our helpers were cutting, sawing, ripping, dragging old layers out, my house fell into construction chaos and all kinds of disarray. We had to misplace all of the furniture to get to the floor, and of course with construction comes tons of tools and gadgets and pieces and parts.

So the living room looked like this:




And this:

And this: 

And this: 

It occurred to me as I stepped around various scattered piles of disarray that with construction it seems like things have to get really messy before they get really glossy. I wondered why I, being slightly OCD that I am, wasn't getting more upset about the disorder littering my home.

This is when it hit me: the mess usually comes before the masterpiece and deconstruction sometimes precedes construction. This is true in home construction and renovation, and it's true in the building of our character.

Sometimes when we look our messiest, God is at work on the most important parts of us. Perfection came at a cost, and the cross, smudged with His blood, is a beautiful messy reminder that even when it looks and feels like we're finished, he's not finished with us, and yet he proclaimed, "It is finished."

Jesus spoke both in retrospect and in the future and those words will manifest in all believers one day. He won the victory for us on a dirty road where his aching feet walked and his abraded shoulders bore the mess and shame of our sin.

There, in the mess, I see images of what the floor will look like when finished. In the meantime it isn't so beautiful, until I learned to look past the mess and see it as the process to perfection instead. We'd do well to offer ourselves and one another the same courtesy of grace as we grow.

I hope you are encouraged today that God is capable of changing us. If you feel stripped or laid bare or rearranged or broken to pieces, surrender. Let him do his magnificent work. You are the masterpiece that Jesus died for. You are worth it, for it was at our messiest that Love came in.

Often things look worse before they get better, but God is always working behind the scenes. For everyone who feels broken or in pieces or torn apart or alone, I pray that you feel his loving, renovating, restoring presence in such a profound way that it overpowers your pain.

Blessings,
Cheryl Wyatt

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