Of Mess and Moxie: Wrangling Delight Out of This Wild and Glorious Life

by Jen Hatmaker

If understood, believed, and lived out, God’s plan would naturally place Christians at the epicenter of their communities, like hope magnets, like soft places to fall, like living sanctuaries.

People may hate us because of Jesus, but they should never hate Jesus because of us.

At its core, love means caring more about that person’s soul than anything else. The

Tell me more about that. Tell me how your thoughts progressed in this. I appreciate your experience with this. I’m listening. I hear what you are saying. I would love to learn from you. I care about how you feel and your perspective here. I understand that. I identify with that. What do you think of __________? I hadn’t thought of it in that way. Thank you for that angle. Let me think about that a bit before I respond. Thanks for your transparency.

It is not my responsibility to change other people, nor them me. It just isn’t. It never was. Remember, the plan involves a heavy, obscene amount of love on my part, but I can take the task of “fixing someone” entirely off the table, permanently. I’m free to love him or her without stipulation, which creates a much wider, safer space to actually let God do what God does, which is redeem all of our lives into glory.

You have no other responsibility than to represent Jesus well, which should leave that person feeling absurdly loved, welcomed, cherished.

We get one shot at this, one chance to live in a way that brings true honor to God, the great Lover of people. After Jesus’s sacrifice, we became the cornerstone of His plan to embody good news as living demonstrations of His character. It is a humbling task with eternal consequences, and may it be said of our generation that we loved well. Just like we were taught. Just like we received.

Two selfish people joining together for life is a miracle every time.

We’re all the same now, brothers and sisters in one family, and Jesus is the entire substance of the church—our front door, our baptism, our High Priest, our bread and wine.

whispering forgiveness on us all.”1 Jesus walked this sacred road first; we cannot claim His mercies without also claiming His practices. We mustn’t expect a resurrected life when we skip over the cost, the commission, the cross.

The work of forgiveness is so challenging—the actual work of it. The naming, grieving, empathizing, releasing. It’s like a death. A death of what we wanted, what we expected, what we’d hoped for, what we deserved and didn’t receive. Burying those expectations, because they are indeed dead, is truly cause for grief. Expect to feel profound loss as you put them six feet under. Into

Henri Nouwen wrote: “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”

Jesus is the sole hero, the only leader truly worth His salt. I have

is outside the possibility of His character. It isn’t just that God is loving but that He is love itself. I am so certain of that. I possess full confidence in God but a healthy skepticism of the human understanding of God. (I used to be the opposite, and I miss the days when I knew everything.)

He wrestles glory from all things.

God, who just picked up the threads of hate and deceit and abandonment and injustice and refashioned them into a truly beautiful story.

This is a perfect depiction of sovereignty to me. He is Lord over all, no matter how it began, how it was meant, how it harmed. He reigns over intent, over agenda, over loss. Nothing escapes His reach, nothing is beyond reclamation in His hands. If someone or something sewed threads of suffering in your life, even if that someone was you, God’s sovereignty says: I’m bigger than that, stronger than that, more powerful than that. I can make this beautiful again and use it to heal you and make you sturdier and, while we’re at it, other people too. At

its most altruistic, loving center, God is indeed glorified through our suffering, not because He is an egomaniac who profits from our losses, but because, truly, nothing bears a better witness than watching God resurrect someone’s life. That is a God who folks want to know, a God worth His glory.