Messy Faith

This is something similar to my talk I gave at the Summer INN two weeks ago. It's not totally the same though due to different audiences, and a fair amount of additions during the talk. For more details on the INN, check out our website at www.theinnministries.org or find us on twitter at twitter.com/theINN 


I've been moving for the last few weeks. I’ve moved out of where I lived during the year, and into a new spot that I’m subletting for the summer. In late august or early September, I’ll be moving again to a more permanent location here in Bellingham. All this means a whole lot of cardboard, piles of stuff, and missing important things. On top of all of this mess in my room, I decided to go down to my parent’s house in maple Valley to fetch a few of those boxes that I haven’t really thought about for the last few years. They’re the things that we’ve all got, like gifts from the last few years, yearbooks, and all sorts of things.

I care about these things, of course, and they have some good sentimental value, but on the other hand, they’ve been in a box at my parent’s house for the last four years and I haven’t thought about them once. I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, but I also can’t figure out how to keep them.

The goal in having all this stuff up here is to be able to work through it, figure out what I do need, what I don’t need, and simplify a bit. I’m really getting bogged down though being in the midst of the mess in my room. I’m tired of waking up and jumping out of bed only to step on several layers of clothes, puzzles and who knows what else. Even though I’m tired of all of the stuff, I’m in the midst of this mess because I know that next year I’ll be much better off having sorted through things.

In a lot of the same ways, stuff piles up in our lives. Not all of it is bad, some is, but all of it makes life a little trickier. It's worth looking into these messes in our lives, and possibly even realizing that God could be working in the midst of them.

We live messy lives. We’re messy people. As much as we’d like to portray an image that we’ve got it all together, we get things wrong, let others down, and fail to love.

I think the summer is a cool time to be around the INN because of a lot of reasons, but I especially love that there are people here that have been going to school at western as well as people who grew up around Bellingham and are back fro the summer, and people with stories that we haven’t heard. We’ve all been in hard, messy places before and this summer is an incredible time to share this with others in the community. Things go differently than we planned, and we run into hurt and pain in our lives, sometimes that we don’t even know about.


Everything seems to get messy in our lives as some point. Relationships with our parents get messy when we don’t call or visit often enough, relationships with our roommates get tough when we don’t do our dishes or can’t pay rent, and relationships with other people get messy when we don’t love them like we should. As simple as loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbors as ourself is by itself, when we apply it to our lives, things seem to get a little bit trickier, messier, mudier.

With all this terrible realization of how messy our lives get, where does God come into all of this? What could a good, perfect, loving God have to do with people who trip and fall in their life, continuously turning to and from God? Despite the fact that we can’t get it right, God still loves and cares for us. In Romans 5, verses 6-8 Paul says this:

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

We don’t have to get it all right, and we won’t get it all right. Even though I have a long history of turning away from God and forgetting to love my neighbors, he died for me. For all of us, He died. Not because we had cleaned up the messes in our lives, but because he loved us. God died for us knowing fully how we have separated ourselves from Him.


I did a quick search in the bible for mess when I started preparing. I was a little shocked at first, when 780 results came up. I was a little disappointed though when I saw that almost all the results were not just the word mess, but usually message or messiah. I scrolled through the list anyway, but as my eyes crossed all of these “mess” words, I started thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence. Now, of course if you go look at some background, or the greek and Hebrew, I’m sure there is actually no connection, but, I found it interesting anyway that God’s message kept coming up, and perhaps the phrasing God’s message has something to do with God entering into our mess, and Messiah has something to do with Christ walking with us and helping us through our messy lives.

The ways that we are challenged to interact with others often causes some messiness in our lives. Loving God and loving our neighbors are concepts foreign to a lot of people around us. Living these things out is challenging. Loving our enemies includes loving those around us that maybe we wouldn’t associate with otherwise. It can mean uncomfortable conversations with people that you don’t know. It can mean stretching ourselves to do something for others without looking for credit. It can mean forgiving others that for largely offensive things when our culture tells us to disassociate with the person. Not only do the actions make our life more difficult or messier, but living the words of Christ gets people talking and most likely questioning what you’re doing.

My room is still full of boxes, piles of clothes and memories from the last 23 years, but I’m working through it. I have to admit though, I haven’t done it all by myself. People have helped me pack, transport boxes, move furniture and more. We shouldn’t be in our spiritual/emotional/relational messiness alone either. We know that God is with us, and it’s important to connect with others in community.