Quit thinking your life, your writing, your kids, your career or your kitchen have to be perfect.

Yes in my Mess FMF

What if we simply said, “yes,” right there in the midst of the mess?

Yes to the water gun fight, yes to bacon for dinner, yes to impromptu ice cream runs, yes to the neighbor kids coming over – again.

I’m starting to believe that the more we get used to saying “Yes” to the small things, the easier those big, life-changing yeses will become.

What if we started with just five minutes of writing?

Say yes with us today. Give us your best five minutes on the writing prompt – MESS. –>click to tweet.

Because my friend Kristen Welch wrote a whole book about how we don’t have to be qualified, we don’t have to be all caught up on the laundry, we don’t have to have perfect kids or a perfect life or a perfect credit score or faith or job to simply say “Yes” to that next thing God is inviting us into.

We can say, “Yes” right there in between all the dirty dishes and last night’s gross pot of leftover mac ‘n cheese.

Rhinestone Jesus: Saying Yes to God When Sparkly, Safe Faith Is No Longer Enough, is proof that we actually can say yes long before we think we’re ready. We just need to be willing.

Reading Kristen’s story will make you feel braver and eliminate a lot of the excuses we like to hide behind. Read it. I dare you.

OK, are you ready – give us five minutes on the word MESS.

GO:

So many days feel like trying to hold back a crashing tide of chaos. There are the shoes I just put away back out on the floor piled up in a heap of colorful plastic corpses. There are the tiny ceramic tea cups all the way from Christmas in South Africa. There are the ketchup stains and stickers and socks that never, ever, not once make it to the laundry basket.

My life is a mighty, irresistible rip tide of mess and there are days I stand on my tippy toes with squawking voice trying to order my way out of it.

Like I can command, cajole, coax the three who bear my name and my DNA to somehow magic themselves into caring that they put the cap back on the toothpaste. They don’t care. They’re too busy making life.

All around me. A whirlygig of crazy, uncontainable, uncontrollable life.

I can’t keep waiting for it to sit down and pay attention and be quiet. I need in. Not out.

I need in.

Deeper into life and exploring and listening and laughing and nodding and following them and the God who built them knee bone to hip bone to spine to big, bright, eyes – always believing that there is hope after the word, Yes.

STOP.