The Messy Middle

God’s a good God and He has a good plan…… Those lyrics have been on repeat in my mind this past month. I believe them and I trust it but honestly it hurts.

We don’t really talk about that a lot in the church. The idea that in the valley, in the darkness, we can choose to trust, we can choose to be faithful, we can stand firm and at the same time we can acknowledge that we are in a season that really hurts.

A season where you are exhausted in every capacity. A season where more times than not it takes everything within you to make it through the day. A season filled with sadness and grief.

What makes this hard is that as a body of believers we just want to skip over the raw, complicated emotions and hyper spiritualize things. At the end of the day it’s easier to give advice and exchange pleasantries such as “Gods going to make beauty from these ashes” or “one day you’ll see God’s purpose in this pain”. I’m not saying those things aren’t true but we try to get people from point A to point B without acknowledging or creating space for the messy middle.

That beautiful, glorious messy middle. We don’t like messy and our natural instinct isn’t to walk toward the hard.

What if, when we see someone in distress and they say they are okay, instead of saying alright and just walking away, we choose to be a presence? We say something like “Okay, well we don’t have to talk but I’m just going to sit here with you”. Oftentimes, when people are struggling our actions speak louder than words.

In the challenging moments we have to remember that Jesus didn’t skip over the messy middle or hyper spiritualize things. Jesus simply entered into and embraced the emotion. In His humanity He made space for it both for himself and those around Him. Throughout His ministry he continually comforted people, sat with them, encouraged them and over all, He loved them where they were.

What can we take away from this?

How might this reminder encourage us to make different choices? Maybe our call to action here is to be a presence, make space for people to be sad and encourage them along the way. 

This could look like approaching people’s sadness differently, inviting someone over just to sit on your porch with you in silence or sending them a card of encouragement. You never know how the smallest gesture might make the biggest difference.