Seeking Lost Beauty — Elizabeth Berget

“Mom! Mom!” my daughter calls me, “You have to come see this!”

Her voice can barely contain her excitement, and as I round the corner for the stairs, I plaster a smile on my face to prepare myself to compliment her 67th coloring sheet of the day. She grabs my hand and tells me to close my eyes the minute I hit the top step and practically drags me over to her bed…

“LOOK!” she says, “It’s so cute!”

I open my eyes, and what I see…
is mess.

There is an ungodly amount of clothes on her floor, that special mixture of clean and dirty that I know will all need to be rewashed anyway. Her walls are covered with overlapping artwork, patched together with yellow masking tape. Books and unruly blankets cover her bed and have spilled out onto the surrounding floor. Her shelves are a menacing eruption of my little ponies, saved National Geographic for Kids magazines, loose rocks, and markers, both dead and alive. It all feels a little bit like a cheerful, colorful seizure — like Pinkalicious grew up and threw a sequin-themed frat house party.

She is standing by her bed, pointing at this:

I squat next to her and force my eyes to focus on her creation, willing the edges to blur out like the portrait setting on my camera, lowering the aperture more and more until I see what she sees: her best stuffed pals, lined up and accessorized. She is beaming, delighted with herself.

Then, I see it too, and I ooh and ahh with her over the headband on her stuffed sloth, the way her sequined unicorn is cuddling up, and how sweetly all the animals are lined up.

Short of physically putting my hand over my mouth, I somehow manage to not mention the mess. This is not the moment for reminders that this kind of mess is 100% a fire hazard and also makes tornado sirens go off in my head.

She had created beauty, found it in the mess, and helped me see it too.

We’re fresh off Christmas and heading into a new year, but I keep thinking about the incarnation — the King of the Universe Jesus, stepping away from his throne, exchanging his royal robes for wrinkly red baby skin and presumably a cloth diaper. I keep thinking about how he got rashes and the flu, how he experienced the smell of garbage and human waste, witnessed kids being bullied and wives being abused.

I imagine his yelp review: “Earth, 0 out of 5 stars. Way too much trash and yelling.” But he chose to look past the mess, not just of our city streets and alleys, but our mess.

There’s this three-part story Jesus tells in Luke 15 about finding what is lost. In the first, a shepherd realizes that one sheep is missing from the flock and leaves the relative safety of his co-shepherds and their nightly fire. This shepherd traverses mud puddles and rocky creeks, creating a ruckus in the quiet countryside when he returns, sheep on shoulder, celebrating.

Jesus moves on to part two, and tells us of a woman, coated in dust as she sweeps her entire house, spider webs in her hair from reaching under cabinets, creating literal mess as she searches for a valuable lost coin. She goes so far as to wake up friends and neighbors for a celebration party once she finds it.

Then, the grand finale: the prodigal son — the story of one father and two very different sons. His youngest bucks societal and cultural norms, asks for his share of his cash from the will, and splits, leaving his father and older brother stunned and embarrassed. The younger son goes off the deep end, spends his money on gambling, booze, women, and ends up destitute, fighting off pigs to get to their scraps so he doesn’t starve to death. In a startling moment of clarity, he returns home with hopes to work as one of his father’s servants, only to find his father sprinting down the driveway. The father looks past his son’s emaciated face and distinctive bovine body odor and embraces him, inviting him back into fellowship as a fully-restored son. The father then throws the biggest party the neighborhood has ever seen.

In each of these vignettes, we see a God who looks past inconvenience, pain, stench, and mess to see us, to see our beauty, to celebrate that we are found, no longer lost.

I’m trying to hold onto this idea as we ramp into 2022, but it’s slippery. There is nothing like a messy countertop to send my blood pressure through the roof, and so help me God, if I step on another lego this week, I will have to consider burning all 750,329 legos in this house in a glorious burning effigy against cluttered floors everywhere. It is easy for me to lose the beauty of my children’s faces, the glories of their laughter, when their piles of stuff are literally blocking my view.

And beyond my cluttered my kitchen table, there is (*gestures widely*) a very chaotic world that 2022 inherited from 2021. There are refugees lined up at borders, still looking for their kids. There are homeless people struggling with days that top out at -4*F. The division over masks and distance learning and vaccines and what actually happened on January 6 is palpable. People in my close circle are dealing with parents’ declining health and foster care family trials and pregnancies that ended too soon.

It’s…
a mess.

This year, I’m searching hard for the beauty in the midst of it. I am trying not to blur out the edges so much as see how the mess enhances what is good: how my friend who is tirelessly advocating for her immigrant dad in a hospital so full of covid patients he can’t receive timely care. How my neighbor keeps showing up in her classroom while burning the midnight oil to keep quarantined kids caught up online and reminding kids to keep on their masks 653 times a day. How people like Sheila Gregoire and Sara Billups are telling the truth in the midst of so much confusion. How my friend came over uninvited and cleaned my house one morning after we’d all been sick for weeks and weeks in November, how carefully she folded my kids’ little tshirts. How my husband and I can still lock eyes over the piles of books and carefully constructed lego creations and laugh together.

There is beauty in the mess.
Let’s find it.
Let’s celebrate it.