What a Mess!

Saturday night, there was a huge storm here.  The wind blew and it blew long and hard.   When I walked outside Sunday morning to make sure that the shingles laying all over the place didn’t belong to my roof, chainsaws were buzzing in every direction.

Trees had been forced beyond their breaking point and things around here were just generally a mess.

As I began to look for my property that had taken flight during the night, I wondered how widespread the damage was.

You may know, I work for an electric power cooperative.  I got on my phone and checked the outage map and was startled to see that nearly one-third of our members were powerless.  That’s 20,000 people and a lot of broken utility poles and trees laying where the trees should not be laying.

All of the linemen were called into work, office workers and other support personnel came to work on Sunday.  There were hundreds of jobs to get done in order to get the system fully restored.

Yes, hundreds of jobs to do, but every crew was given one place to start, one job to complete, one goal to obtain.  When that one thing was done, they were given another and when that was done yet another.

After a couple of days of working more hours than folks are meant to work, the entire system was up and running again but it was done one job at a time.

I remember the day I sat and looked at myself at the bottom of my life.  I saw a mess.  I was so far gone I thought I was hopeless.  But thanks to friends, the advice of others and a program called Celebrate Recovery, I started what appeared to be a journey I could not finish.  I took that first step to recovery.

I was overwhelmed by the giant scope of my restoration.  I was broken in so many ways. CR helps me to break it all down to one day at a time, one job at a time, one step at a time.

I sit here today and many other days, writing, taking personal inventory, striving to maintain and improve on what has been recovered, what has been restored and turn it into more than I ever dreamed possible through the help and strength of a loving, forgiving God.  Tears push and squirm to escape my eyes as gratitude swells up within my chest.

I just want you to know, to understand, that there is hope.  It doesn’t come in a rush like a giant wave crashing over you and taking away all the damage that life has handed you over time.  It comes in the next step, the next day.  It comes between now and tomorrow as you learn to let that next little piece of guilt or loss go to God.

There is no one that can’t be more tomorrow than they are today, no one beyond the reach of grace and hope.  Just find the courage to do what comes next and forget about what comes after that.  Just take the next step, tackle the next job and move that mountain one shovel full at a time.

Matthew 6:34 So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

No matter how bad things look on the road ahead, there is a way.  No matter how broken we are, we can be healed.  Tackle today, finish it well, step in the right direction and hit the bed tonight knowing that tomorrow you can do the same.  It will change your life.