A Bowl to Hold Our Mess

I visited my family this weekend, and it had been several weeks since I had been in my mother’s house. One of the first things I noticed was a bowl on the kitchen counter. Now, you maybe thinking a bowl on a kitchen counter isn’t abnormal at all.

You see this was more of a decorative, wooden type bowl not a bowl for baking, cooking, or eating. Even more interesting than this out of place wooden bowl was the contents: a stopwatch, coins, a pen, manly objects I could not identify, and other random stuff. Now, the best part is that I knew the men in the house and immediately understood my mom’s placement of this bowl. You see, the men have a habit of dropping change and other random objects on this portion of the kitchen counter near the door as they clear their pockets when they come home or as they drop items they don’t need on their way out of the house.

        I remember from a very early age my mother asking her husband to come and remove the items he left on the ‘bar’ (as we affectionately called our kitchen counter). The entertaining part is I think most of the time he would collect his items only to move them to his side of the dresser in their bedroom. Still, in a cluttered pile only it was now on his side of the top of their dresser.

Isn’t that how we work sometimes as Christians? We lie down in bed after a long day and pray about our mess, but we don’t always pray with the confidence that God will handle our ‘stuff’. Sometimes we don’t even realize which stuff we drop at His feet. It’s like the habit of leaving items on the kitchen counter, and we don’t really think about what we’ve dropped on the counter. Then, maybe later we notice the ‘mess on the bar’ or someone asks us to do something about our stuff, so we move our mess to another place. The mess isn’t gone we just think hiding it from loved ones or praying half-heartedly to God takes care of the issue, but the stuff is still there. The best part though is that Christ knows our mess, and He works a lot like that bowl. God holds our mess, and while it doesn’t make the stuff of our mess change or look prettier it is much less chaotic in His hands.

“¹³ For I, the LORD your God, will hold your right hand,
          Saying to you, ‘Fear not, I will help you.’” Isaiah 41:13

So, who holds your mess? God will gladly hold us and our messes if we let Him. Christ also provides people in our lives to help us through our disorganized stuff. (Apparently, my mom is great for that! She had the insight to place that bowl where my family needed it. I guess after 20+ years of marriage and 3 children she realized the mess wasn’t going to change, but she could change how she handled it.)

        How do you handle messes? Have you ever been able to help with someone else’s mess? What would the bowl that holds your mess look like? Would it be a big bowl right now? Or a small bowl? Maybe it is totally festive with fall and Thanksgiving decor all over it. Does your bowl have the same few items, or does it have a lot of random contents? Please leave a comment below.