Sometimes I get stuck because I feel like I should have it all figured out by now. I shouldn’t be struggling to parent, relate well, write, or focus enough to spend my energy on things that matter to me.
I think I should know it all by now. It’s been a decade, eight years, seven years, a lifetime. I shouldn’t be struggling to make it work or feel more than marginally competent.
But, of course, that expectation is unreasonable and not even possible. Even if everything is going right, there is always going to be something that doesn’t work.
Sometimes it’s small little blip in a conversation that goes awry, and sometimes it is something that feels like an explosion on the road behind you that just threw you on your face. You’re not sure if you’re actually injured but the impact is big enough to sit you on the side of the road weeping.
Big or small, it’s vivid, real, and difficult.
I still feel surprised when I get hit in the face of all my feelings with my own mistakes or incompetence in a moment, or the thoughtless words that come back to haunt me when I’m trying to go to sleep.
It can be an endless loop. Sometimes it can seem like there is no right way out of a mess in this broken world. And maybe that’s true.
Butt there has to be hope, because there always is.
No matter what.
Even as the dust rains down on our heads after yet another fall into the pits of humanity, even as we’re berating ourselves for all the wrong words or remembering the right ones we should have said, even as we all are muddling along together while assuming everyone else has it figured out by now – God’s got this.
He has us all. He has these lives of ours. He has all the plates we’re spinning. And it’s not in His plan that we should know it all or be able to greet every moment in our day with just the right amount of grace and holy expressions on our face. He is there for us in the mess even when we show up in all our wrong-feeling skins, when our attitudes beat us to the punchline, and when we forget whose image we bear when we claim our identity in Jesus.
He is right there, coming alongside our struggle-bus sense of self.
Sometimes wholeness is more about being broken than being whole.
This expectation of wholeness is how we begin to see brokenness, and then brokenness is where we begin to see God more and more.
Maybe that’s the wholeness we really need.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this, too. Thanks for reading!
I’ve been musing on wholeness for more than a few years now. Most recently in this series Whole Together Family. You can find more posts here.
Erika Shirk 