Pain is Invisible. My Mess is Not.

It begins with the ringing of the doorbell.  The thing that tops the list of the most horrifying sounds in the world to a mother with sleeping children, right next to the sound of something alive in the closet and smoke alarms.

When I’m through making my best effort to tip-toe (on crutches) to the door, he helps himself to a glance over my shoulder at the thing that tops the list of the most horrifying sights in the world to a self-admitted (but recovering) clean-a-holic:  my real, live, lived-in mess.  

[Half-folded laundry, half-read books, and a left-over birthday balloon.]

I am supposed to be having a nerve block right now.  The one that I have waited weeks for, and am very much needing.  He doesn’t know that, though, because here I am, answering the door.  My poor child with the stomach bug, whose care was much more important to me than that nerve block, will be coming out here momentarily, because she heard the doorbell and now she’s awake.  

The other two of my children will soon be waking from their naps, as well, needing snacks and bottles, and eagerly re-building whatever use-every-piece-of-furniture-and-every-article-of-clothing-from-the-closets “fort” I had attempted to clean up during the past two hours.  These last few minutes of nap time are extremely precious.  The last thing I want to be doing is attempting to convince my friendly door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman that I do not, in fact, want to spend twenty-two hundred dollars on a machine with twenty-two hundred uses.  My money would be much better spent elsewhere.  Like on a maid.  

He eyes my used-to-be white area rug and with pity in his eye (or good salesmanship), he offers to clean the carpet for free.  A no-strings-attached demo of the amazing $2200 vacuum cleaner.  I shrug my shoulders.  I’ve already told him that I’m not buying anything, and he still wants to clean my carpet.  Sounds like a pretty decent deal to me.

But then, he says it.  And I begin to deflate.  “You have a really hard time keepin’ up with the cleaning, dontcha?”

If you only knew, Mr. Vacuum Cleaner Salesman.  If you only knew.  

Pain is invisible.  My mess is not.  

I happen to love cleaning.  With a slightly creepy and obsessive Pinesol-is-one-of-my-favorite-scents and I-know-that-pouring-coffee-over-your-hands-after-cleaning-a-drain-will-neutralize-the-slippery-cleaning-solution-base kind of love.  But, everything in my life changed with a four-letter diagnosis.  

[We're also in the middle of packing the house up to move]

I thought I was doing a pretty good job up until this moment.  I had the laundry half-folded, part of dinner was neatly tucked into the crockpot, most of the dishes from lunch were taken care of, and I’d only had to re-heat my cup of coffee four times before I finally got to start drinking it.  On a typical day, that cup of coffee sits in the microwave for at least three hours before I get to it.   

Adding insult to injury, he starts sucking dirt out of all of my furniture and laying it out on glaring filters, in case I need another reminder that I can’t keep up.  Pain is invisible.  My mess is most definitely not.  

[Yuck.]

To top it all off, he decides that it will be a fun game to produce a tower of toxic, carpet cleaner bubbles to entertain my children.  Bubbles, to kids, toxic or not, are a hands-on game.  Which means that I get to pick up the “Do not pass GO.  Do not collect $200.  Give three pre-dinner baths in the next five minutes” card.

[Who knew that a vacuum cleaner could spray bubbles?]

Somehow, even though he is clearly less than satisfied that I am much more than satisfied with my current vacuum cleaner, I am still able to usher him out the door.  With a used-to-be white area rug that’s not even that much whiter for the ninety minutes that are now behind me.  A lingering reminder that I can’t keep up with what I once could.  Pain is invisible.  My mess is not.  

And, it’s ok.  

Not because “I’ll get over it,” or because “Someone else is probably worse off than me.”  

No.  

It’s ok because Jesus meets me right here—in the middle of my mess.  He doesn’t measure what is hard for me against what is hard for someone else.  And, no matter what anyone else may see, my pain is not invisible to Him.  He sees it, He understands it, and He wants to hold me and help me through it.       

The only scale that my pain and my mess truly get weighed on is the one that measures eternity:  the cross, where Jesus took on our pain and died for our mess (Isaiah 53:4; and now, in case there’s any confusion, we’re talking about sin mess, falling short of perfection mess, we are all full of it and Jesus still loved us enough to die for us mess, not I-was-desperate-for-more-light-in-the-living-room-so-I-chose-white-in-a-colorful-world carpet mess).  

He is “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).  He doesn’t tell us to get over all of our troubles.  He has compassion on us in them, and He comforts us all the way through them.  It matters to Him—what we are going through.  He comes to us, to where we are, right in the midst of our pain.  He strengthens us and gives us courage for the journey.  He takes on our mess and He washes us clean.  And, He doesn’t charge us $2200.    

Two songs that I've been loving right now: "How Can It Be" and "Come As You Are."

The Lord will surely comfort [His people] and will look with compassion on all [their] ruins; He will make [their] deserts like Eden, [their] wastelands like the garden of the Lord.  Joy and gladness will be found in [them], thanksgiving and the sound of singing (paraphrase from Isaiah 51:3).