The old becomes new- good news for you!

A few nights ago, while praying, I felt God giving me a mental picture using my before/after desk pictures. I was thinking about the fact that sometimes we want everyone to think our lives are like this:

When in reality, on the inside, our lives feel more like this:

Why is it that we feel like we have to hide our messiness, even what we feel to be our ugliness? Even to the ones that love us best- we sometimes feel like they will desire us more if we can only hide this sin, or that struggle, or whatever it is.

And you know what, the Bible says that man does look on the outside, and God looks on the heart. (I Samuel 16:7) But wouldn’t it be awesome if we learned to share our true hearts with our friends, our families, our neighbors. I think the body of Christ would greatly benefit from more authenticity! Yes, the inside may be messy. It may feel ugly. But if we want to know one another truly, it’s time to open up sisters! {and brothers!}

The truth is, we can’t hide from God. Much like this photo partition {in the pic below} did a bad job of concealing the mess behind it, sometimes we think we can get away with hiding from God. But look, you can see the messy corner peeking out from behind. So no matter how hard we try, sometimes the “corner will peek out,” so to speak. But he loves us anyway!

The amazing news is- Christ can make the old become new, the messy become clean.
Does this mean that everyday will feel well put-together and pristine? Heavens no. Life has seasons of messy and crazy for anyone, but the difference is that Christ brings a calm, and a peace to our messy, crazy situations.

So even when we have days that feel like this- {and you will!}

-we can have hope that God is using those days, to complete a picture in his will, that will in his timing, look like this.