Monday, March 11, 2013

You embrace my mess

The lyrics, "Bind my wandering heart to thee," often leads my mind to a picture of a cartoon story of the prodigal son that my sister and I watched as kids. The prodigal son left his father's house with his inheritance, ran, and lost it all. When he gains the courage to return home, he decides he will have to work off what he owes and eat with the pigs. The cartoon shows an early 20's boy eating the slop in a pig trough. A pig trough. That's just absolutely disgusting. Yet, he was worried that his father would not take him back.

My sins often do that to me. I eat at the pig trough wondering how angry and disappointed God must be. My appealingly innocent mind has been ravaged and become a battlefield that Satan loves to fight in. My thoughts wonder and make up a fantasy future life. It's not weird to dream or hope but it is too much to dwell on an unrealistic world. I cleaned my movie and book shelves. I cleaned them of media that makes me just think about marriage and a wedding. They're unrealistic and demeaning to women who everywhere are making up these fairy takes that do not come true. I am not opposed to fairy tales at all but realize I'm not at a place where I can just watch or read about it all the time. They make my mess. They cause my heart to wander and wish.

I thought about these things a lot today during both messages that I heard. Jesus has made me new. He, like the prodigal son's father, opens his arms wide open at the edge of his field and when He realized it was me, He ran. He ran and picked me up, dusted me off, kissed me on the forehead and forgot my wrongs. He cleaned me up. He embraced my mess. He didn't leave me where I was, He made me new. In real life, we are moody and emotional, easily entangled by things that don't matter. If we would drop those things or not, we would realize that God stands in the very middle of the mess we've made with wide open arms and a huge smile on his face and a twinkle in His eye. He does not fail. He does not.

"Prone to wonder, Lord I feel it.
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it.
Seal it for thy courts above."

He embraces your mess too. -Melis

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