Posted: 12/03/04
DOWN HOME:
God, creativity, chaos & beauty
Don't worry about the Loch Ness Monster and/or Bigfoot. They don't exist.
If they did, we would've found them.
Joanna and I spent the better part of a Saturday helping our youngest daughter, Molly, clean her room. We didn't encounter any world-famous monsters, but that's about the only thing we didn't find.
Well, no monsters and no old sandwiches emblazened with faces of the Holy Family. You heard, of course, about the 10-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich with the “Virgin Mary” on one side. It sold for $28,000 on e-Bay. It came out of somebody else's bedroom that must have been–hard as this is to believe–worse off than Molly's room.
(Come to think of it, weird portraits of Mary and Jesus aren't that rare. When our family lived in Louisiana years ago, my friend Sonny drove down to check out a picture of Jesus that suddenly appeared on a screen door. “Didn't look a thing like Jesus,” Sonny reported. “More like Willie Nelson, I'd say.”)
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But back to Molly's room. It's known to scientists as a “black hole,” where gravity is so strong nothing escapes.
Fortunately, the willpower of exasperated parents is stronger than the gravity of a thousand black holes. So, we began “liberating” long-lost stuff from Molly's room.
She discovered a letter our friend Susan sent with Molly's “care package” when she went on her first choir tour in seventh grade.
She found a jumprope in her underwear drawer.
We pulled out clothes she hasn't been able to wear since she was so skinny she had to run back and forth in the shower just to get wet.
You may have heard about a possible steel shortage. Fear not. We extracted all the extra hangers out of her closet. We're recycling them, and the Steel Belt is back in business.
Ironically, about the only thing we didn't pull out of Molly's room was food. That's probably because (a) we have a dog and (b) I have retrieved countless Dr Pepper cans and chocolate milk glasses through the years.
Too bad about the food. If we had found an old cheeseburger with sesame seeds miraculously formed into the likeness of Katie Couric on the bun, we could've sold it on e-Bay and financed our Christmas shopping this year.
As I stood in Molly's closet, untangling hangers and organizing clothes (“dresses, skirts, sweaters, shirts, slacks, shoes”), I thought about Genesis 1, God's creativity and my own limitations.
God made heaven and earth out of “formless and void” chaos. And here I'm doing good to restore order to a teenager's chaotic room.
Thankfully, God created beauty out of chaos. When I think about my lovely daughter and the random clutter of her well-lived-in room, I realize beauty and chaos aren't that far apart.
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