Facing the Mess

Have you ever taken on the task of cleaning a seriously messy house? Not an ordinarily messy one, but an extraordinarily messy one? Consider the kind of place where you might, for instance, find a Twinkie suspended in thick layers of spider web. I really did find one once while cleaning a very messy home. It must have either been a recently dropped Twinkie or a shockingly well-preserved one… Either way I was surprised to find it hovering there behind the couch. 

If you’ve ever cleaned a place like the one I’m describing you’ll probably remember the feeling you had when you first walked in the door, full of energy and resolve— ready to conquer the mess. If your experience was like mine, you’ll also remember how quickly your energy and resolve seemed to drain as you began to digest the magnitude of the task before you. Where to start? You may have wondered just how much time and work it would take to make a dent in the mess, much less conquer it. 

The first day I worked in the “Twinkie House” I remember pulling a little foot stool into the middle of the room and sitting on it with sagging posture and the beginning of a headache. I remember thinking how much I’d like to go to sleep, maybe even right there in the floor, if I could find a place. It took a while to push through that initial sense of exhaustion and get down to work. And from time to time, even after I’d begun my work, that same sense of hopelessness would come over me again and I’d have to push through it once more to get back to cleaning. 

I found that the important thing to remember when facing an overwhelming mess is to simply start cleaning wherever you are. You’ll find that as you work on one thing it will lead to another and another and another. Sometimes you’ll make amazing strides faster than you expected, and some tasks that seemed pretty simple will turn out to be far more involved than you’d imagined. 

For the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself sitting with sagging posture and the beginning of a headache, looking around at my country and my world. I feel extremely small, maybe the size of a quark, and I’m looking at an unbelievably complicated and enormous mess of prejudice, anger, hurt, political unrest, and disease. I’ve wondered aloud, “What can I do to make anything better? Where do I start? And what difference can I make?” But then I remembered the Twinkie House and what I learned while cleaning it. Start where you are and let one thing lead to another. When you get overwhelmed and find yourself staring hopelessly at the size of the mess, which you will, then again—start where you are and let one thing lead to another. And although I am very small and the problem is very big, there are many more small people out there and we can get a lot done together. And God’s love is huge, even bigger than the mess, and his love and strength and goodness doesn’t sag under the weight of the problems we face. If we keep our eyes on Him, we’ll have the courage to keep working.   

~Amy