#Priorities

I’ve confessed my hypocritical house cleaning skills before.  If you’ve ever visited us, maybe it seemed we had a tidy-ish, semi-organized home.  Well, appearances can be deceiving.  Whatever “order” you observed has a whole messy Laura story of stress, over-reaction, and emotional bedlam behind it.  Ask David.  I’ve followed in my Mama’s footsteps this way.  We don’t DO gatherings at our residences well.  Even if we enjoy the prospective company, we’ll flip-the-heck-out like an over-caffeinated, obsessive chihuahua during preparation and until festivities begin.  Also sometimes during.  Also after.  It’s super fun, as you can imagine.

So when adoption (and later foster care) visits were scheduled to gain social worker approvals for both us AND our home, the antics were beyond sense.  Legitimately threat level midnight type hysteria.  I *may have* been spotted raking invisible leaves off our front sidewalk and/or straightening dusty boxes in the attic.  Yeah.

Listen, we judge on the superficial.  Somehow a clean house, or adorable Instagram photos, or a put together outfit, or a fancy car become indicators for our intrinsic value.  Which is the total crap that we spend our lives in the push-pull of fighting against/deeply internalizing.  Because we aren’t dummies.  We KNOW our clothes aren’t US.  And yet, something about a tailored suit, a coach purse, immaculate interior design, or high professional status screams “I MATTER” to our brains.  So we learn to fix the outsides to mask the inside, only choosing to share what fits within the cute window of acceptable.  But the harder we work to conceal our inner chaos, the more divided we feel.  Split in two: Outside us versus Real us.

Here’s the thing though, the people who truly care embrace your mess.  They want YOU, not your public representative.  Unless your house looks like an especially bad episode of Hoarders (In which case, contact my girl Meghan), they won’t blink an eye.  And PS, if it gets to that point, the good ones show up with a mop and trash bags.  This is the heart of Jesus.  Meeting people where they are without judgement, THEN raising them up using tenderness and truth.  He never meant for us to live broken in half by worldly pressure; He died so we wouldn’t have to.  1 Samuel 16:7b says, “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”  God knows ALL of you.  You can’t impress or fool Him.  Underneath whatever facade you’ve constructed, He sees your injured soul.  He sacrificed His son to redeem those corrupted parts of you.  A gift given before we could ask, as He already loved us fully and completely even before He had formed the very earth we'd walk on one day.  “God showed how much He loved us by sending His one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through Him.  This is real love—not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” -1 John 4:9-10

This past weekend we got to host a foster child.  A five year old boy.  Of course, you’ve probably (correctly) guessed that I was having ALL THE FEELS on top of stressing about the house.  But when he strolled in, those extraneous fears just fell away.  My focus shifted to parenting him with boundaries, constructive language, and affection.  Because it wasn’t about the folded clothes still on top of the dryer or the dust bunnies littering our bedroom floor, it was about connecting.  It was about love.  And after only 5 minutes when the boys were fighting a glorious lightsaber battle, it clicked.  Duh Laura, THIS is what matters.

Do you spy a mournful dog wanting to join in?