Finding Hope in the Mess

When it comes to holiday decor, you could say I’m an aspiring minimalist. I used to have many small decorations and door hangings for each holiday, but then I realized they weren’t bringing me much joy. Half the time I forgot to unpack them from their storage-tub homes in the basement before the holiday passed. I donated most of them in the past year, and I haven’t missed them.

Christmas is my one exception. I don’t go over the top, but I like a festive feel from late November through early January. I love stringing garlands, placing ornaments on the tree, and filling our home with the scents of the season.

Of all my decorations, my multiple nativity sets hold special places of honor. One set features a fair-haired, fair-skinned holy family cast in delicate ceramic. This grouping of figures adorned my grandparents’ living room for decades before I inherited it upon their passing. Another set was a birthday gift from my mother—simple wood figures painted in creamy neutrals. In stark contrast, a third wood-carved nativity boasting elaborate patterns and colors such as fire-engine red and fuchsia, a small handmade ornament from Mexico, hangs on our tree. Perhaps the most special vignette, shaped in clay by my eldest son’s seven-year-old hands, is hardly recognizable as a nativity.

The sets look different, but the essentials are the same. Mary and Joseph adore the newborn Jesus as animals, shepherds, and wise men look on. Another striking similarity is the pristine sterility of each scene.

We tend to whitewash Jesus’s coming. We set up figurines without a blemish on tidy tufts of hay or sparkling fake snow. I love my nativity sets, but they’re a far cry from what it looked like the night God entered the world in Bethlehem.

The truth is Jesus entered our muddled world in a messy beginning.

Imagine the scene with me. The damp hay mixed with animal dander and dung blend to form an odor strong and acrid. Animals fidget and bray with nervous energy as Mary sweats, grunts, and strains against the increasing pressure in her pelvis. Eventually, the baby arrives, covered in blood and mucus and fluid. His parents clean him as best they can. Finally, they rest, exhausted from the ordeal of birth.

I think it’s significant that Jesus chose to enter the world this way. I’ve walked with him long enough to know nothing he does is an accident. As the incarnate God, he could have taken any form and arrived in any condition. Of all the infinite possibilities, he chose the womb, the way we all enter this complicated, broken world. Our Savior decided to meet us in the mire we made with our own hands, by our own sin.

The world feels heavy these days. The cracks of racism, sexism, and political polarity we’ve tried so hard to conceal or ignore are showing on the face of our culture. Headlines advertise addiction epidemics, violence, and disasters. Where can we find hope in a chaotic world? Simply put, we find it in Christ, who entered the mess with us.

No mess is too massive for Jesus. No sin is too extreme, no situation too hopeless for Christ to enter and begin the clean-up process. Jesus used spit to make a healing mud, compelled the three-day-old corpse of Lazarus to come back to life and walk, and washed the day’s dirt off his followers’ feet just hours before he would sweat blood in preparation of his ultimate sacrifice. Jesus is no stranger to the grime of this world, yet he makes even the putrid holy.

Church, we need to heed this lesson. Jesus entered the mess for us, and we need to enter the sloppy parts of life for his people. Church attendance dwindles year after year. Much of the world sees Christians as an elitist group of hypocrites who fail to practice the radical love and “come as you are” acceptance we preach. What if we sat with people in the trenches instead of keeping the good news to ourselves in ivory towers? What would the world look like if we put on our boots and worked in the harvest Jesus called us to? (Matthew 9:37 ESV)

Will you set aside your affinity for a picture-perfect life in return for a life marked by the profound sacrificial love of Jesus? Will you allow messy people into your life for the sake of the gospel? Can you acknowledge your own mess and gratitude to God for loving you, not despite the mess, but in the midst of it?

We’ve found the hope in the mess. Now it’s our job to share the hope. Embrace the wonder of the nativity this season and share Emmanuel, who entered the mess for us all.

Lindsay Hufford is a writer, slow marathoner, home educator and mediocre knitter. Her favorite things include books, kombucha, kitchen dancing, natural wellness, Jesus, and nachos. She spends days with her handsome hubby, three adorable kids, a flock of hens, a runaway peahen, wandering barn cat, and rescue dog. Lindsay shares ways to live simply and love extravagantly at www.lindsayhufford.com.

Photograph © Dan Kiefer, used with permission