"Facing our messiness is the linchpin of our salvation."
That beautiful gem is from this article.
We all have messiness. Mine, personified, is a big giant robot with eyes like a black hole. That, or something akin to this guy:
The Lima Bean Monster, from the eponymous book by Dan Yaccarino.
He's loud, and he's big. He shakes the earth when he walks. Stuff falls off of him as he goes by. And if you're turned around backwards and have your head shoved into the sand-- if you're not able to look him in the eye-- all of that it going to combine into something much, much worse than it is: a giant pile of rotting legumes interspersed with socks.
In the book, the kids defeat the monster by eating him. They literally climb aboard and chow down, consuming their fears and watching as he shrinks down into nothingness. But before they eat him, they have to face him. In facing him, they are saved.
This is a pretty unsophisticated metaphor, I'll grant you, but returning back to the real world where facing our messiness means confronting, moving through, and then continuing on, well-- that's kind of amazing.
The first step is turning toward, no matter how large or loud the lima beans. And if we stay with the discomfort long enough, we will be utterly changed, and the story that comes after that is far more important than where we were before.
And that's my epiphany for this morning: both little and enormous at the exact same time.
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