I’ve always been a bit of a disappointment. A misfit toy. Someone who, more often than not, resided somewhere outside the box.
I haven’t always had the tidiest of lives.
In my younger years, a tidy life meant that you were thought well of by the neighbors and you made your parents proud. Later on in life, as my world revolved around the conservative evangelical church community, a tidy life meant that your theology was right and therefore God wouldn’t be mad at you.
I didn’t fit the mold as a kid. Or as a teenager. Or as a mother. Or as a wife. Or as a realtor. Or as a Christian.
No matter the scenario, tidy and I were like oil and water. For a very long time this was a source of shame.
When you have been on the receiving end of impossible expectations or at least ones that seem impossible for you to meet, you can go one of two ways: you can dish the same out to other people or you can do the opposite and fling your arms wide open.
I’ve come to the understanding that God has never asked me to be tidy. That was a standard set up by other people due to their own discomfort with disorder, mess, and people in all their fragile humanity.
And I’ve come to realize that I don’t want a tidy life.
I want a REAL life.
I want a life where compassion and curiosity and awe and kindness and understanding are more important than what things look like on the outside or whether or not they check some arbitrary box.
I want people to feel the freedom to sit with me and let who they are, who they really are, spill out, knowing that there will be no judgment, no fixing, no disappointment.
I want to understand deeply.
I want to speak truthfully. And graciously.
I want to give generously.
I want to love extravagantly.
That’s the life I want.
Tidy be damned.
