Move Toward the Mess: Curing Boredom in the Christian LifeSample

Moving Toward the Mess

The world thinks religious people spend all their time being, well, religious. Not Jesus. He spent his days with messy people in messy situations. He ate with crooked businessmen who cheat people out of their hard earned wages. He befriended the terrorists of his day. They were called zealots back then. He hung out with prostitutes. Not former prostitutes, but girls who were still in the trade. He was constantly in the middle of all manner of messy situations, speaking words of grace and truth and chastising the religious leaders for keeping themselves aloof from these dear people whom God loved. It’s what Jesus did back then and wants to continue to do now through his people. That would be through you and me.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to quit your job. It just means you have to think about your job differently. Yes, honor God through the excellence you bring to your work, but realize there’s more to it than that. Your job can be a place where you engage with the brokenness of the world. It can provide an opportunity to practice “the transforming power of being with.” When you start to open yourself up to this new way of thinking, you’ll discover formulas don’t work. Religious platitudes will ring hollow. There will be times when you don’t know what to do or what to say. The people God brings across your path will care much more about your compassion than your theology. But hang on to your hat. Life will start to take on a whole new perspective. It won’t just be a job any more. It will become your calling.

Moving toward the mess isn’t an elective for spiritual giants. It’s at the center of what God is doing in the world. He moves toward the mess in order to redeem those who have created it. He wants us all to get involved. Granted, we will have different roles in the effort. But it’s all about the same thing. It’s like being a soldier in World War II: Some people were on the front lines, some were mechanics who kept the tanks and trucks running, and some were medics taking care of the wounded. You may be in any of a thousand roles. But they’re all about fighting the war. They’re all about beating the enemy.

So why should you bother with all this? We mentioned two reasons at the beginning of the chapter. Moving toward the mess will kick boredom right out of your life and it’s also one of the best ways in the world to learn to follow Jesus. But there’s a third reason. You won’t discover this third reason until you meet your version of Terry (my person within the mess, read about it in the full book).

I’m convinced that if we let him, God will bring someone like Terry into every Christian’s life, including yours. When that happens you’ll discover that moving toward the mess is also an affair of the heart. When your version of Terry shows up, faith gets personal. The chaos takes on a human shape. It has a voice. It has a story. You’ll discover you’re no longer talking about principles and statistics and ideas. You’re talking about someone’s life, someone you’ve started to care about. When that happens, you’ll start to feel about that person the way God feels about that person.