For several years of my life, I’ve kind of been... a mess.
A few years ago, I realized that I was wrestling with generalized and social anxiety, and it was taking a significant toll on my quality of life.
I ended up seeing a Christian counselor, who helped me dig up a lot of the lies and fears that contribute to this anxiety: things that I was falsely finding my worth and identity in, ways I viewed God (and myself) that were neither healthy nor true.
Through that long process, God slowly but surely helped heal me of my anxiety, until there came a day when it wasn’t an issue for me anymore. And I was able to live, almost completely anxiety-free, for a solid year.
But... earlier this year, the anxiety started to come back, and I had no idea why. It was so subtle at first that I hardly noticed. And even when I did notice, I lived in denial for a while. It must just be a temporary thing.
You see, the thing is, you can only be a mess for so long before you worry that people are growing tired of it: that you should be “over it” by now.
And I felt like a failure, since my anxiety had come back. I had done so much healing over the past couple years, and now it felt like none of that mattered.
A few months ago, my family came over to celebrate my birthday in my new apartment. I went into a panic, because my room wasn’t nearly as finished as I wanted it to be. There were mountains of paper that I couldn’t sort through, bags of art supplies that I simply didn’t know what to do with.
So, what did I do with it? I did what everyone does in a crisis: hid the mess. Shoved it under my bed. Into my closet. Into drawers it didn’t belong in.
Because I wanted to prove to them that my life wasn’t a mess. That I had it all together. That I was a mature, functioning, adult.
And when they commented on how much they liked how I had “organized” the place, I wasn’t able to take any of it to heart.
Because I knew about the mess.
The day after my birthday, as I spent time with God, I realized that something just felt... off.
And it hit me: in the same way that I had shoved all of my physical mess into hidden corners of my room, I was trying to cover up my emotional and mental mess. Trying to pretend that I was adjusting well to being home, that I had healed from all of my anxiety… because I thought that was what was expected of me.
I hadn’t been acknowledging how much of a mess my life was. Instead, I was trying to get through it all on my own, pretending that I had it all together. I was trying to put tiny bandaids on a hopelessly gaping wound, thinking I could hold it all together myself.
I finally cracked. I broke down, and just cried and cried and cried. Cried that I felt so isolated and alone in a place that I called Home: a place that had once felt so safe and familiar. Cried that I was having to deal with anxiety all over again.
One of the verses that has kept coming up over the past few months has been 2 Corinthians 12:9:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with this verse. Late in high school, I was wrestling through a desert season, and when I prayed to God about when I would leave it, or if there were things I could do to get out of it, this was the verse I was brought to.
As if God was saying, “I’m not going to take you out of this yet... but I will brings you through it. Find your strength in me. Lean on me. Let me be your strength.”
It was what I needed, in that moment. It taught me how to embrace the deserts, and to lean on God in the midst of them.
However, ever since then, I’ve often viewed this verse simply as a fancy way for God to say “no.”
This has been reinforced by other people, who, with good intentions, will tend to bring it up when you’re struggling with an illness or a particular situation you want to be rescued out of.
“Well,” they’ll say, “remember Paul. He prayed for God to take his issue away, and instead, God told him that His grace was sufficient...”
When my anxiety came back, it wrecked me, because I thought I was done with it forever. I had to wrestle through fears that maybe this was just my life now. Maybe anxiety was just part of who I was, and I would have to deal with it and try to “manage” it for the rest of my life. I pleaded with God to not let that be so.
And when this verse started to pop up over and over again, I was afraid that God was saying, “No. This is just your life now.”
But as I spent time on my face before God, I was hit with a realization: that’s not all this verse means. It means that I have permission to be a mess. A complete and utter mess.
Because His power is made perfect in weakness.
I don’t have to do anything on my own. Because, frankly, I can’t.
I am free to be a mess. Because God’s got me. His strength, His unwavering grace, is more than enough for me.
In the previous chapter in 2 Corinthians, Paul writes: “If I must boast, I will boast in the things that show my weakness.”
And the full context of that verse that had haunted me for so long was this:
“But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
I don’t have to be strong. I don’t have to have it all together. Because God does.
There’s such freedom in that, isn’t there? In knowing you’re free to not be ok?
God is able to take the messiest of all messes, and use them for His glory. He’s able to make them beautiful. When we’re weak and broken, when we don’t have the strength to do things on our own, we’re forced to rely on God. He gets all of the glory, because we know we can’t make it on our own.
His power, His greatness is magnified, and shines through my weakness. Through my mess.
So, really, me trying to cover up my mess is actually just a selfish, prideful act. I hide the mess because I want people to think that I have it all together: that I can do this on my own. But being honest and open about my brokenness? That takes the spotlight off of myself, and shines it on Jesus.
And let me tell you something else: I’ve felt less anxiety since that day when I finally acknowledged it. It’s not perfect and completely gone, by any means… but it’s definitely less than it was.
Now that I no longer feel that pressure to hold myself together, I’m able to let God do it for me. He’s a whole lot better at it than I am.
He’s the only one who can take this broken, jumbled up mess and turn it into something beautiful.
Photos for this post were inspired by a Japanese pottery repair technique called Kintsugi.