Wrap it in Lights

On Christmas Eve I decided to treat myself to a little holiday drink at Starbucks, just to feel a little taste of home, and as I was waiting on my Uber outside the store, I looked up to see this…

I laughed thinking, “that’s so ridiculous, instead of detangling the wires to make the street look nicer, they just tried to drown out the mess by wrapping it in Christmas lights, what a weird thing to do.” Then after looking at it a bit more I felt convicted like, don’t you do that all the time? Take situations that are hard, ugly, or uncomfortable and throw a bow on them to present to the world so your life looks more put together and pretty? I was doing just that the moment I saw the lights in the first place! Buying a ridiculously priced drink in order to feel better about missing my family and being away from home at Christmas time. It looked better to just post a pic on Instagram of my tasty coffee than to actually let the world know how I truly felt.

In total transparency, I have a tendency to do this pretty often. If you knew me in high school you’d know I cried over the most ridiculous things. For literally no reason. All the time… but then when big things occurred that actually resulted in pain I usually didn’t show a lot of emotion and dealt with things privately. My mom and I eventually came to the conclusion, after I literally wept watching the new Winnie the Pooh movie, that I am kind of the queen of displacing my emotions. Throwing tears onto something stupid instead of letting them out when it actually made sense because that felt embarrassing or too real to show other people. Through some growing and learning, I can thankfully now process my emotions a little more rationally but I still see this “wrap it in lights” mentality happening in my day-to-day life.

Whether it be something small like posting a photo on social media of the amazing coffee shop I went to that day when in reality that day was actually really hard at work, or maybe like not really being honest to the people that care about me about hard things I’m dealing with or tough questions I’m asking the Lord. I think this looks different for everyone, but I think we all do it in our own shape or form because who doesn’t want to look like they have it all together right?

The more I’ve been thinking about these stupid lights the more I have been transparent with the Lord and asked Him to help me be transparent with the people that love me and even with the people that don’t know me. I hear Him saying, “but how can anyone see the work I am doing in you if they can not see where you started? I am untangling your wires one at a time and more knots will be made as I untangle, but someday they will all be perfectly in line as they were always meant to be.”

Allow yourself to be free to be messy. Let people see the hard stuff only the Lord is able to bring you out of and the constant untangling that is happening in your lives. Eventually, if you keep throwing lights on your situation, there’s going to be a power outage and your lights aren’t going to work to hide the mess anymore, so let people in. Let them see the mess so you can work on untangling it together.