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

by Jen Hatmaker

Making your home pretty is nice, but making it nourishing is holy. Sister, paint that chair or hang that mirror, sure, but for the love, don’t wait until everything is done before putting on a pot of chili and inviting new friends over for football. Your neighbor wants to belong far more than she wants to be impressed.

So let’s start there: you are worthy and capable of creating. Full stop. Making art or literature or music isn’t reserved for the elite.

There is something courageous about acknowledging your ability and right to create, even in the midst of “a real job” or mothering or managing.

We were both so young, so freshly launched in our own skin that we weren’t yet entrenched in our habits, our passions, our preferences. The main scaffolding was in place: our devotion to Jesus and crazy, mad love. With the structural elements and a few load-bearing walls in place, something happened after the wedding: We grew up together.

Rather than navigating our twenties as two individuals blending very developed lives together, we matured as one unit, writing a new adult story with our lives.

Our teens need to know that we are for them and with them, not just when they are performing well but in struggle, failure, calamity. This is, after all, exactly how God loves us.

God rewove what was torn into a stronger version than the first. 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 prof...