A few months ago I wrote a blog called "Kitchen Tables." You can click on the link and read all of it, but it was mostly about my church and community and friends, and how they're all in Northwest Oklahoma City. I wrote about one friend in our group who decided that it was time for her to move from Moore to Northwest Oklahoma City. It was time for her to stop dipping her toe in the water and do a belly flop. I hinted around the idea that I might eventually take that plunge also, and I did recently. And Jesus continues to show me why it's worth coming to the table.
When you experience grace, you learn to give grace. It's when you're surrounded by people who continually give you grace through your mess, that you truly learn how to be gracious.That's how it's worked for me at least.
I'm not the most organized person. In fact, it's fair to say I'm the least organized person. I was moving out of an apartment that had seen the hardest and darkest year of my life. Although things had been better for a few months, it was almost as if the darkness hadn't lifted on that apartment. I can't think of one good memory there. Needless to say, it was a disaster when it came time to move a couple weeks ago. My room was a wreck. I hadn't the slightest idea which clothes were clean or dirty. There were plates and glasses and sunflower seeds and crumbled up Wendy's bags. Picture frames were knocked over and DVD's scattered the floor.
It had been fine, because only I had to see that place. I didn't invite anybody over, and I was never home. I just slept there. My friends offered to help when it was time to move, and you'd think with what I just described I'd clean so that they could help me clean. But remember that part about me being unorganized. It was now moving day, and my friends showed up and experienced the disaster. I'm pretty sure they were hesitant at first, "Do we really love him thisssss much?" Everything was such a mess that I wasn't even sure how to ask them for help. They were there, and willing, but I didn't even know what I needed. We all began arbitrarily packing things up. I was more embarrassed than I had been in a long time, and these are people that love me as much as anyone in the world.
I'm pretty sure I was annoying the crap out of my friend Jacob, because out of my embarrassment I was trying to help everyone that was helping me. I don't even know if that makes sense to you. I wanted their help, but it was so awful I didn't want them to have to do anything. Every time Jacob and Thomas would pick something up to carry to the truck I'd try to intervene and take one of their places.
That's when Jacob said, "Dude, let us be your friends!" - This changed everything. He meant, let us love you. Let us come into your mess and get filthy and tired and pull you out of it. Let us spend two Saturday's moving in the freezing cold. Let us be disgusted and embarrassed with you.
Grace is never given partially. If it is, it isn't grace. My friends didn't load up the truck and drop everything at the front door of my new apartment. Instead, they helped me unpack all of it. They helped me create a new home and a fresh start. They didn't love me half way, they gave me everything they had.
This is what Jesus does for us, right? He comes into our mess when everyone else has given up on us. He gets dirty and messy and embarrassed with us. In John 5: 1-8, Jesus heals a paralytic who had been an invalid for 38 years. Every day he laid on a mat near the sheep gate pool trying to bathe. He never made it into the pool. He couldn't move and people would just pass him by. Jesus finds him there and heals him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk."
What we miss in this verse is that this paralyzed man was trying to bathe, and had been lying on a mat everyday for a very long time. He couldn't bathe. He couldn't find a restroom. He couldn't change his clothes. He didn't have deodorant. Or soap. Can you even begin to imagine what his mat probably smelled like? What a mess it was? I think my old room was getting close to this. Do you think Jesus stood on the other side of the street and healed him so he wouldn't have to smell him? I doubt it. I bet Jesus was all up in this guys mess. Right there with him. Pulling him out of it. Healing him. And telling him to take his mat, as a reminder of that day.
I think at some point we're all this man on the mat. Whatever mess we find ourselves in, whether we created it or not. We don't know how to get out of it. Maybe we've even given up. Maybe the water is right there at the sheep gate pool, we're so close, and we just can't make it. So we settle for living on the mat.
It's when we're exhausted and broken and so tired of trying to get out of our mess that we stop and listen to Jesus saying, "Dude, let us be your friends!" - This is what grace looks like. This is what love looks like. It's messy and it comes to get dirty and pull us through every single time. So you will make it through the mess. You will experience grace that you don't understand. Friends will love you like you're their family. You will be made whole.
And when we make it through the mess, we've got nothing left to do but cannon ball into the sheep gate pool.
More to come - J
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