Messiness

I grew up in the church and was a youth worker in various churches and denominations. I had a pretty tidy view of God; there were the answers I’d learnt mainly in Sunday School and Youth Group, and anything I couldn’t grasp I put down to my youth. Tidy.

The thing is that through my travels around the world and my work, I’ve been exposed to seeing the world as it is – a world of pain and suffering and struggle. So my once neat and tidy image of God no longer fits. Where is my God of love who saves us, where’s my gentle Jesus meek and mild? Now my image of God has no neat lines or easy answers. It is an image that challenges me and fills my world with more questions than I have answers. Messy.

Maybe it’s just my awkward character, but I’ve come to quite like that God isn’t that easy to put in a box. I like that my messy God understands my messy spirituality, which seems to reflect a messy world. But this untidy God hasn’t left us without any idea of how we should be. In the early 20th century George McLeod wrote this:

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the centre of the market place as well as on the steeple of the church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves, on the town garbage heap, at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write his title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was the kind of place where cynics talk smut, thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. That’s where he died. And that’s where Christians ought to be and what Christians ought to be about.”
That quote reminds me that if we shy away from the frontline, if we’re too comfortable, we become ineffective. Being tidy about our faith and our mission might well be the easy option, but it’s when we get messy that we start getting the job done.