A little disorder

I almost titled this "A little chaos," and then I looked up "chaos" and its definition includes the idea of "confusion" and "randomness," so that's not the right word for what I mean to talk about.

My house is in great disorder today but not in chaos. It all started when I decided to buy contact paper for the shelves in the mudroom. But then I happened to look up at the ceiling and it was bubbling and peeling and I grabbed a scraper and started scraping.

Then, of course, the die was cast and I had to finish what I started. The mudroom looked so good after a lot of sanding and two coats of paint that the baseboards in the rest of the house started to look bad to me. As the sandpaper, primer, and semi-gloss were already out, I attacked these next. I didn't mean it to be a big project, but one thing led to another, and now the furniture is helter-skelter, and all is covered with old bed sheets, and we have to pick our way through new pathways to the kitchen and upstairs.

As the baseboards are connected to the doors, it seemed logical to do those too. And why do just one side of a door and leave the other undone? Which naturally led us to the dining room. The project took on a mind of its own and climbed the stairway to the upstairs hallway.

I am, by constitution, a person who loves tidiness and order. I have loved it, in my life, to the expense of change and improvement and (may I say) love. Preference for order can be idolatrous, idolatry being that which one's soul serves above all else.

There are other kinds of wrongful love for order, such as my former pastor Jack Miller described in his book Outgrowing the Ingrown Church:

"We have surrendered our hearts to the familiar forms of our religious life and found comfort of soul, not in knowing God, but in knowing that our worship practices are firmly settled and nothing unpredictable will happen Sunday morning. Thus we have lost contact with the risen Christ. …"

Pastor Miller mentioned an incident in which a mainline pastor decided to preach on John 3:3 and the "new birth." A woman in the pew was suddenly brought under great conviction and irresistibly approached the pulpit. In a startling departure from church order she said to the preacher before the whole congregation, "I need Christ so very much. Please tell me how to get this new birth." After a stunned pause, the pastor simply ignored her and went on with his sermon. The woman fell on her knees and remained there. The worship service continued as usual, after which everyone left without speaking to her, even the pastor.

Sometimes "disorder" is a bad thing. But sometimes it is the prelude to something wonderful. Whether in painting a house or in more important endeavors, let us welcome the second kind of disorder. It is not the same as chaos.