Living with the Mess

Life is messy. At least, that's my experience.  I wish I had more time with the people I love. I can't keep all the balls in the air. My expectations of myself and others are often unrealistic. I struggle with resentments and keeping my side of the street clean. I don't have it all figured out. I say the wrong thing. I don't say what I need to say.... But I jump in because I want to live life even with its messiness.

But somewhere along the way I got duped into thinking that life is a competition and I should hide my mess. Image is what matters. 

As a woman who is looking to find her identity in something deeper than external markers, I know that my worth is not measured by what's on the outside. In fact, it's not measured at all. My inner life is not in competition with anyone else's. No matter what I might be hearing around me. And yet, you would never know that walking into many of the places of worship across my city. Image is still a big selling point. And sadly, the church is not devoid of it.

I say this with grace because I buy into it too. Culture is part of what influences us every day. But it can also get so tightly wrapped around our spiritual identity that we forget that God wants us to discover who we are on the inside and see the places in our culture that rob us from deepening our spiritual identity.  I believe that we have to acknowledge those places if we are to discover who we are truly meant to be.

For me this was one of the gifts I received from leaving my own culture and learning to live in another. I did that for four years. And it sent a lightening bolt through my own cultural identity.

For two of those years, I shared an apartment with women from three different cultures and lived in a fourth. My own cultural markers no longer had any relevance. The city where I was grew up, the university I attended, the church I attended, the foods I missed, the music I listened to -- they had no relevance to those I was building relationships with. We shared bits of our culture with each other, but we had to go deeper than that. We had to find connections based upon what made us human beings and how we wanted to relate to one another. It took effort. It took commitment. It took humility. It took love and forgiveness. It took prayer. Sometimes it was messy. But it was beautiful. It was real. It was life.

Today I want to celebrate the mess. The beautiful mess of living life in the midst of a culture that says beauty is only seen on the outside. I want to be a person who lives more rooted in my spiritual identity than in my cultural identity. I want to be an authentic follower of Jesus who discovers what it means to listen to his voice above all others.

This post is dedicated to Doris, Renee and Stephanie for putting up with this loud American.