Getting It Together—Or Not

“If I could just get it together.”

Have you ever noticed how often women say this? Maybe not publically, but if you could listen in on small groups, phone conversations, counseling sessions, I think you’d hear this a lot. At a small-group meeting in November, I heard it come out of the mouths of all five women there, including myself. If we could only . . . just . . . get . . . it . . .together.

Everyone’s “together” looks a little different: losing weight, improving relationships, balancing the checkbook, parenting with consistency, running a household, getting dinner on the table. I struggle with all of these, but my big one is organization. I can organize words and ideas with precision, but give me a closet or a cupboard, and I’m a disaster. If I could only get it together maybe my house wouldn’t be such a mess. Maybe I could actually find all those missing things. Maybe we could stop living in fear of people dropping by unexpectedly. If only I could get it together.

It doesn’t help that everyone else appears to be so together. That’s one of the good things about age and maturity—you realize nothing is as it seems. No one has it together, at least not completely. There’s some area in all of our lives that we’re ashamed of, that we feel helpless to change, that we try to hide from everyone else. On some level, we all know we’re a mess.

I am consoled by the fact that God loves messes. This isn’t just something we tell ourselves to make us feel better; we have biblical evidence that Jesus came specifically for the messes of this world. The woman caught in adultery from John 8 had her mess publically displayed. She was about to be killed for it. The religious leaders drag her to some teacher—she likely didn’t even know who He was if she was too caught up in her mess to notice—who’s playing in the dirt. What was she thinking? “Why couldn’t I get it together? How did I let myself get to this place? And what’s this man going to say about it?” She had to be surprised when He called out everyone else’s mess instead of her own.

What was the Samaritan woman thinking (John 4) as she drew up water from the well? Was she pondering how well her life was going, how proud she was to be living the way she was? My bet is that at that exact moment she was thinking, “If only I could get it together.” Then up walks a stranger who tells her “everything she ever did,” but He doesn’t focus on her mess. He focuses on His truth, His power to satisfy her deepest longings. It’s not the mess that matters, it’s the One who cleans it up.

So here, on January 22, 2012, I publically state that I do not have it together. I’ll never have it together. If by some miracle I get beautifully organized in 2012, I’ll just become more aware of some other mess in my life. The same is true for you. We weren’t made to get it all together. Even if we could, we live in a world that specializes in our unraveling. That’s why the Savior came—to save us from our messes, to love us in spite of ourselves, to offer us a future in which we’ll finally be the people we long to be.